Setting up your community

During the pilot we onboard each community manually so we can help you pick the right kind, set sensible defaults, walk you through inviting your first members and (if relevant) set up your stall / POS / memberships. To kick off:

• Visit /contact and tell us about your group — name, what kind (parish, club, PTA, etc.), rough member count, what you want from the platform.
• Pick a slug — this becomes parishlarder.uk/c/your-slug. Lowercase, letters/numbers/hyphens. Can't be changed later so think about it.
• Send us a logo if you have one (square PNG/JPG, can be a JPG of your crest), and an accent colour (a hex like #c2802f, or a colour name we can match).

Turnaround is usually two working days. We come back with a draft community for you to look at before it goes live.

The kind you pick at setup drives which modules switch on by default — meant as a starting point, not a cage. Everything is toggle-able afterwards from your admin dashboard.

• Parish / village / town — all 10 modules on (Town Crier, What's on, Classifieds, Walks, Stalls, Time Bank, Petitions, Recipes, Parish council, Stories, Members).
• Sports club / club / church / school / group — Town Crier, What's on, Stories, Members.
• Social club — adds Classifieds.
• PTA — adds Classifieds (uniform swap).
• Farmers' market — Town Crier, What's on (market days), Stalls (stallholders), Recipes, Stories, Members.
• Charity — Town Crier, What's on, Time Bank (volunteer matching), Stories, Members.
• Committee — Town Crier, What's on, Petitions, Stories, Members.

Open /c/<slug>/admin → Modules to tick / untick. Disabled modules vanish from your subheader, your welcome tiles and discovery surfaces — like they never existed for your members.

From /c/<slug>/admin → Branding:

• Display name — what shows in the subheader, on cards, on email subject lines.
• Tagline — a short line under the name ("Cricket in the Dales since 1892", "Where Cavendish gathers").
• Description — longer paragraph shown on the community welcome page.
• Logo — JPG/PNG/WebP/AVIF up to 8 MB, square works best. Uploaded straight to Vercel Blob from the form. Used in the subheader, on cards, as the fallback avatar for members.
• Accent colour — a single hex. Drives call-to-action buttons, the trim above the subheader, accent strips on emails, icon backgrounds on member cards, the progress bar on petitions.

Changes apply instantly. Test by visiting /c/<slug> in another tab.

From /c/<slug>/admin → Invite someone:

• Type their email, pick the role (member / moderator / admin).
• Hit Send invite. They get a branded email with the community's accent colour and a one-click "Accept your invite" button.
• The link works for 14 days. Multi-channel delivery means dev environments without Resend show the URL in the server log — copy it from there during testing.

When the invitee clicks the link:

• Signed-in with the same email → joined instantly, lands on the community home.
• Signed-in with a different email → friendly mismatch banner; they sign in with the right one.
• Signed-out → sign-in page, with their invited email pre-filled. Sign-in creates an account on the fly if they don't have one.

A "Members" notification fires once they accept, so the other community admins know who just joined.

Enable the Stalls module. Then on /c/<slug>/stalls, set up your stall:

• List merchandise (shirts, mugs, scarves, badges), homemade preserves, raffle tickets, ticketed events.
• Customers pay through Stripe — UK card or Apple/Google Pay. Standard processing fees apply (typically 1.5% + 20p UK card).
• Accept payments at events via the Parish Larder mobile POS — tap-to-pay-style flow on any phone or tablet running the app. No card-reader hardware required (though we support hardware terminals if you prefer).
• Generate one-off invoices to members, suppliers or sponsors from the stall dashboard. Email them straight from there; payment lands same-day via Stripe Connect.

Daily payouts, real-time takings on your dashboard, audit trail of every transaction. Same till handles online sales, POS, invoices and ticketed events.

Memberships are subscription products on your community stall — same plumbing the platform uses for seasonal subscription boxes.

• Set the price (annual, monthly, family rate, junior rate, life membership).
• Set the cadence (annual is most common; monthly supported).
• Set the benefit text shown to the buyer ("Use the bar, vote at AGMs, 10% off the kit shop").

Members pay through Stripe; renewals happen automatically; the membership shows on their account. As a community admin, you get a live roster of paid-up members in the Stalls dashboard with CSV export — useful for the club secretary at AGM time.

From /c/<slug>/admin → Notifications, tick which channels your community can deliver through:

• Email — Resend-powered. Works on day one with no setup.
• Web push — browser notifications on Chrome, Safari, Firefox. Members register once from their /c/<slug>/notifications page.
• Mobile push — via the Parish Larder mobile app (iOS / Android). One install, all your communities push to it.
• SMS — Twilio. About 4p per UK message. Already wired (used today by the Check-on-me wellbeing module).
• WhatsApp — also Twilio. Code is wired but needs a verified Twilio WhatsApp Business sender + Meta-approved message templates before deliveries land — we can help you through this.

Each member then opts in/out per kind × channel from their own /c/<slug>/notifications page. Default is fully subscribed; "Mute everything from <community>" is one click.

Communities have three visibility levels, set when we onboard you:

• Public — anyone can browse the community's pages. Default for parishes, farmers' markets, churches.
• Private — only members can see the content.
• Invite-only — same as private, plus the community doesn't appear in the public /communities directory.

Posts within a community are scoped — they never leak to other communities or to the platform-wide feed. Member rosters on private/invite-only communities 404 for non-members so the membership list doesn't leak.

Scroll to the bottom of /c/<slug>/admin → Ask for a feature. Pick a category (Module / Commerce / Communication / Integration / Other), give it a title and a description, optionally a use case.

Our platform team triages every request from /admin/feature-requests and walks the status through Submitted → Under review → Planned → In progress → Done / Declined. You see the current status — and our reply — under your request on the admin dashboard.

Real-world examples in the queue today: team-sheet builder with squad rotation, fixture list with home/away grouping, AGM voting, league-table integration, mass-text member dues reminders.