Planned Not yet started — this page describes the intended design and build plan.
Overview
Builds directly on the shipped school holiday calendar: a subscribable feed of school closed days,
homework due dates, fee notice deadlines, and permission slip deadlines that a guardian or teacher can
add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook — the calendar app they already use, kept in sync
automatically rather than checked separately.
How it will work
Private per-guardian feed. A guardian gets a personal feed URL covering their own linked students' due dates, protected by a secret token rather than a login — calendar apps can't authenticate the normal way.
Public per-school feed. A separate feed of the school's holidays and non-instructional days, useful to staff and guardians alike, with no student-specific data in it.
Always current. The feed updates automatically as new homework, fee notices, and permission slips are posted — no re-subscribing needed.
Revocable. A guardian can regenerate their feed token at any time (for example, after losing a device), which immediately invalidates the old feed URL.
Development plan
1Data model & tokens
A secure, per-user feed token used in place of a login for calendar-app access.
Token regeneration endpoint that invalidates the previous feed URL immediately.
2Feed builder
An endpoint generating a standard iCalendar (.ics) feed from a guardian's linked students' homework, fee notice, and permission slip due dates.
A separate public school-holiday feed, generated from the existing holiday calendar data.
3UI
A "Subscribe to calendar" section in the guardian and teacher views, with a copyable feed URL and short instructions for the major calendar apps.
A visible "regenerate link" action for revoking access.
4Testing & scoping
Tests confirming a guardian's feed only ever includes their own linked students, never another family's data.
Confirming a revoked token stops serving the feed immediately, not after a delay.
Technical considerations
Standard iCalendar (RFC 5545) output means it works with any calendar app out of the box — no Notipa-specific plugin required.
Token-based access keeps the feed private without needing calendar apps to support a real login flow, which most don't.
No push infrastructure needed — calendar apps poll the feed on their own schedule.