Changelog

Added

• — Searchable granting organization. The grant form's "Granting organization" field is now a combobox that searches every organization on the site as you type, with the underlying Combobox primitive available to the rest of backstage.

Changed

• — Category tags are tinted, not framed. A category chip is now a soft wash of its own colour with a solid dot, so a static label no longer reads like a button.
• — Chips and panels follow the density radius. Interactive chips now round with the site's control radius and highlight in the accent colour on hover, and the monogram mark became a filled square.
• — Empty states sit on the surface. The "nothing here yet" panels across backstage now use the surface background so they read as panels rather than bare borders.

Added

• — Entity chips. People, venues, organizations, shows and festivals are now referenced the same way everywhere — a small bordered chip carrying the thing's own photo or logo, or a circle marking what kind of thing it is when it has none. A project page shows the venue it plays and the companies producing it, an event shows its show, venue and presenter, and a venue shows the companies attached to it. Producing companies had never appeared on a project page at all.
• — Dates and times are spelled in one place. Every date and time in the app now runs through a single formatter, and times are marked up so browsers and search engines can read them. This is the groundwork for choosing a date format and a 12- or 24-hour clock from site settings; the choice isn't switched on yet, so dates read exactly as they did before.

Changed

• — Website links are chips too. Links out to a company's, venue's, person's or festival's own site now show that site's favicon next to its domain, matching everything else. Personal profile links were a hard-coded blue that ignored the site palette; every chip now follows the theme in both light and dark mode.

Fixed

• — A broken favicon no longer sticks. Moving between pages could leave a website chip showing the fallback globe for a site whose icon was perfectly fine.
• — Website chips no longer report you to a third party. Loading a favicon sent the visitor's address and the page they were on to the icon provider; it now sends neither, and holds off loading until the icon is actually on screen.

Changed

• — New palette — warm off-white, earth tones and teal. The site now sits on a warm #fbf9f3 ground with a stone neutral ramp, terracotta and ochre accents, and teal links, replacing the muted purple and blue. Dark mode moves to a matching warm near-black rather than a cold grey.

Added

• — The theme is editable in Directus. The globals singleton gained a colour picker for each of nine palette roles — background, surface, ink, muted ink, line, accent, accent foreground, earth and highlight — once for light mode and once for dark. Values are rendered as CSS custom properties during server rendering, so a colour change in Directus shows up on the next page load with no deploy.
• — Newsletter signup. A subscribe form at the foot of the homepage — openings, deadlines and calls from across the performing arts, in one email. Addresses go straight to MailerLite from the browser; a rejected address comes back with the reason next to the field rather than a generic failure.

Fixed

• — No flash of light mode on a cold load. The theme is now applied before the page paints rather than after the app hydrates, so opening the site in dark mode no longer flashes the light palette first.
• — The opportunities composer no longer eats your posting. Submitting the form at /opportunities/new cleared every field and only then admitted that posting isn't connected yet — so the notice arrived after the work was already gone. The form now says so up front and its fields are disabled until there's a backend to post to.

Added

• — Project editor. Create and edit the shows your organizations produce — title, status, dates, synopsis, and the venue or festival they play. Projects belong to the company that produced them, so creating one asks which of your organizations it's for.
• — Cast and crew credits. Add and remove credits on a project, each with a role, an optional department, and a billing order. Credits are what connect a show to the people in it, and they surface on those people's profiles.
• — Event editor. Add performances, galas, workshops, and talkbacks to the calendar, tied to a show, a venue, or just a place and a time.
• — Organization details are editable. Name, discipline, description, founding year, and contact details — the thing /backstage/organizations has been promising since it was built.

Changed

• — Backstage now lists only the organizations you actually belong to. It previously listed every organization on the site.
• — Editing an organization requires belonging to it. That check was missing entirely — the roles manager would take edits from any signed-in member.

Added

• — Accounts. Sign in and out with an email and password. Sessions are one httpOnly cookie, revoked server-side on sign out, and an interrupted sign-in returns you to the page you were headed for.
• — Backstage — the signed-in workspace, in its own muted brick-red palette: a dashboard, a profile editor (pronouns, bio, links, social handles), an organization manager with per-organization people and roles, a venue editor (capacity, tech specs, contact, booking, address), and a grants manager.
• — Chat. Real-time rooms inside backstage. Messages arrive live over a WebSocket, send optimistically so your own line appears instantly, and group the way Campfire's do — consecutive messages from one person collapse together, and a new day draws a separator. Includes one-to-one direct messages and a people directory to start them from.
• — Regions. An optional region segment in the URL (/waterloo/venues) scopes every listing to that region. A picker in the top bar switches regions and remembers your choice; region index and detail pages describe each one.

Changed

• — Every public route now lives under the optional region segment, so the same page works region-scoped or unscoped without a separate set of routes.
• — Listing pages load through region-aware server loaders rather than fetching the full catalogue and filtering in the page.

Removed

• — Emoji reactions on chat messages, which shipped briefly and were cut.

Fixed

• — Chat going silent after deploy. Directus routes real-time events through a message bus that switches to Redis whenever Redis is configured; ours wasn't delivering, which drops every subscription while the API and health checks still look perfectly fine. The backend now uses its in-process bus.

Added

• — RowLink primitive giving every bordered-list feed (deadlines, events, jobs, grants) one shared row layout via Svelte 5 snippet slots (lead / trailing).
• — App version in the footer, linking to this changelog at /changelog.

Changed

• — Section headers now use a compact button for their "View all" action and a balanced, single-line title, replacing the oversized filled button that broke alignment when a title wrapped.
• — Unified the dashboard list rows onto RowLink so padding, alignment, and pills read identically across deadlines, events, opportunities, and grants.

Added

• — Initial preview of the Performing Arts Commons: dashboard, projects, people, venues, organizations, festivals, calendar, forum, opportunities board, grants, and search, backed by a local Directus instance.
• — Shared editorial component kit (primitives, shell, dashboard, forum, jobs, grants) and class-based dark mode.