USER GUIDE
Departments & Groups
Organize your staff and content into departments (or groups, boards, committees, and the like), each with its own home page, contact details, and staff directory.
Before you begin
On an empty site you can create a department/group right away — nothing needs to exist first. A couple of things help:
- Decide how you want to organize your site: often one department/group per office, board, or committee.
- Staff members are added from their own user records, not from inside the department/group. If you plan to build a staff directory, make sure your staff users exist first (see the SimpleStaff app).
- You will need appropriate administrator permissions to create and edit departments/groups.
What a department/group is
A department/group is a container that brings together people and content under one organizational unit. Each one can have:
- A public home page with its own web address, welcome text, news, and calendars.
- Contact information — address, phone numbers, email, and social links — shown on a contact page.
- A staff directory listing the people who belong to it.
- Ownership of content such as pages, forms, and FAQs.
You can also set a Type for each one — Department, Authority, Board, Committee, Commission, Council, Court, District, External, or Staff Group. A "Staff Group" is a special hidden type used only for managing staff permissions; it does not appear in the public directory.
Everything lives under Left menu › Departments & Groups.
1 Find your departments/groups (Manage list)
Open Left menu › Departments & Groups › Manage. The list shows each one with:
- Name — click it to open and edit.
- Type — Department, Committee, Board, and so on.
- Members — how many staff belong to it.
- Public URL — the web address of its home page, if it has one.
You can sort by any column, and select rows to run a bulk action such as Delete. Deleting is a soft delete, so it can be recovered by support if needed.
2 Add a department/group
From the Manage list, click the link to add a new department/group. The edit page is organized into tabs. Start on the Home Page tab and fill in the basics:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | The department/group's name, shown everywhere it appears. |
| Type | Choose Department, Authority, Board, Committee, Commission, Council, Court, District, External, or Staff Group. |
| Contact Email Address | The main email address for this office. |
| URL | The web address for its home page (shown with a "/departments/" prefix). |
| Home Page Content | A rich-text welcome message, edited with the Page Editor. |
| News / Calendars | Optionally show selected news categories and calendars on the home page, each with its own title. |
Other tabs let you go further when you are ready:
- Group Contact Info — full mailing address, up to three phone numbers, a fax number, a directions link, social media links, and checkboxes to control which details show on the public contact page. This tab also holds the directory description used in your site-wide directory.
- Hours — list your hours of operation, one row per line.
- Layout & SEO — page template, meta description, page title, and other page-labeling options.
- Versions — a history of past edits.
Click Save when you are done. You can return and refine any tab at any time.
3 Assign staff to a department/group
This is the step people most often look for in the wrong place. You do not add staff from inside the department/group. Instead:
- Open the individual staff member's user record (in the staff area).
- Turn on their Display in Directory setting for the department/group.
- That person now appears automatically in the department/group's Staff Directory panel (on the Group Content tab).
Once they appear there, you can drag and drop staff to change their order, and mark someone as Featured to show their photo prominently in the public directory.
4 Check completeness with the Group Status Report
Go to Left menu › Departments & Groups › Group Status Report. This is a read-only, at-a-glance report showing which parts of each department/group are set up. For every one, a green check or red X tells you whether it has:
- Page content (a welcome message)
- How many pages it owns
- A slideshow
- A calendar
- Announcements (news)
- An address
- A short description for the directory
Use it to spot which offices still need attention so your public site looks complete and consistent.
Next steps
After setting up a department/group, add its staff members (SimpleStaff), point a navigation menu at its home page (Menus), and give it pages, news, and forms of its own. See the User Guides index for those topics.