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How the website is built

Read this once. It is the idea that makes everything else in the handbook make sense.

You fill in forms, the site builds the pages

Most websites are edited page by page: you open a page, you move things around, you save. This site does not work that way, and that is on purpose.

Here everything is a record in a list. A destination is a record. A faculty member is a record. An academy is a record. You open a record, fill in its labeled boxes, and save. The public pages are then assembled automatically from those records.

So you never build the Kayak page. You add a Kayak destination, a Kayak schedule, and a few Kayak faculty members, each labeled for Kayak, and the Kayak page gathers them up and lays them out for you.

The payoff: you cannot break the layout by editing content, because you are never touching the layout. You are filling in a form.

The three kinds of thing you will meet

You do not need the technical names, but you will see these patterns everywhere, so it helps to recognize them.

Records (the content). The actual stuff: academies, destinations, schedules, faculty, courses, FAQs, forms, job listings. Each lives in its own list in the left menu. Full map on Where everything lives.

Labels (how records find their page). Dropdowns like Academy, Quarter, and Academic Year. A label is how a record says "I belong to Kayak, Q1, 2026-2027." Get the labels right and the record shows up in the right place on its own. This is the "address" from the mailbox idea, and it is Rule 2.

Connections (records wired to each other). A few records are linked to specific other records, like a Destination tied to its Schedule, or a Faculty Member tied to the Courses they teach. This is what lets a destination page show its schedule's events. You make the connection in a box on the edit screen.

The one thing not to touch

The visual layout is built in a tool called Bricks. Editors do not open it. If you ever see Edit with Bricks, skip it. Every task in this handbook is done through normal forms, never Bricks.

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