JoomSchool - Manage Users (Parents, Students and Teachers)

JoomSchool turns three kinds of people into Joomla users: students, teachers and parents. This article walks you through adding each one, linking them to the rest of the school (classes, subjects, children), and the everyday tasks of editing, unpublishing and deleting them.

Overview

Every person who logs into JoomSchool — whether to record attendance, view a child's report card, or check homework — needs both a Joomla user account and a JoomSchool profile. The JoomSchool profile is what stores the academic information (which class a student belongs to, which subjects a teacher teaches, which children a parent has) while the Joomla user account is what lets the person log in.

JoomSchool keeps these two records in sync automatically. When you add a student, teacher or parent, you can either:

• Create a brand-new Joomla user at the same time (you fill in an email and a password), or
• Link an existing Joomla user (you pick the user from a list).

JoomSchool also creates three Joomla user groups during installation — Students, Teachers and Parents — and three matching access levels. Anyone you add to a JoomSchool profile is automatically assigned to the correct group, which is how the frontend knows what to show them.

Prerequisites

Before adding users, make sure you have:

• An Academic Year marked as the current year (set up in the Manage Academic article).
• The classes, sections, divisions and subjects you intend to assign.
• A transport route for any student who travels by school transport, if applicable.
• For parents: the students you want to link as their children must already exist (so add students first, then parents).

The recommended setup order, which avoids empty dropdowns, is: academic structure → teachers → students → parents.

Adding a Student

Go to Components → JoomSchool → Students and click New. The student form is split across four tabs.

Profile tab

If you have defined custom fields for students (see the Custom Fields article), they appear under the Profile tab too.

Academic Info tab

Account Details tab

Use Existing user = Yes to attach the JoomSchool profile to a Joomla user that already exists (typing the user's name in the search box). Use Existing user = No to create a new Joomla user on the fly:

Photo tab

Upload a photo with the Photo field. Photos are stored under administrator/components/com_joomschool/photo/students/. After saving, the uploaded photo is shown as a thumbnail.

Click Save & Close when you're done. The student now appears in the list, the linked Joomla user is added to the Students group, and the student can log in to the frontend portal.

Adding a Teacher

Go to Components → JoomSchool → Teachers and click New. The teacher form is similar to the student form, with two differences:

Academic Info tab

Message tab

This tab provides a quick way to send the teacher an ad-hoc email (subject + body) without leaving the form. Use it when you want to send credentials, instructions or feedback after creating the account.

Profile, Account Details and Photo tabs work exactly like the student form. Photos go into administrator/components/com_joomschool/photo/teachers/.

Adding a Parent

Go to Components → JoomSchool → Parents and click New. The parent form has the same Profile, Account and Photo tabs, plus one parent-specific field:

Academic Info tab

When a parent has more than one child enrolled, link all of them here. The parent's frontend dashboard, payment view and attendance report will automatically let them switch between children.

There's also an optional Comment field at the bottom of the form for internal notes that other admins can read.

Editing a User

Click any row in the Students, Teachers or Parents list view to open the edit form. You can change every field, including the academic assignments, without re-creating the underlying Joomla user. Changes save immediately when you click Save or Save & Close.

Two operations behave differently from what you might expect:

• Changing the email address on the Account Details tab updates the linked Joomla user's email too.
• Changing Existing user from "No" to "Yes" lets you reassign the JoomSchool profile to a different Joomla user. The previously linked user is not deleted.

Unpublishing vs Deleting

Each list view supports four bulk operations from the toolbar:

• Publish / Unpublish — toggles the Status field. An unpublished student does not appear in attendance lists or the parent's child picker. The Joomla user is not affected.
• Archive — moves the record to the Archived list. Same effect as unpublish for day-to-day use, but keeps the data clearly separated as historical.
• Trash — moves the record to the trash. Reversible from the Status: Trashed filter.
• Delete (empty trash) — permanently removes the JoomSchool profile. The linked Joomla user is not deleted automatically — if you also want to remove the user, do so from Users → Manage.

For end-of-year cleanup, prefer Archive to Delete: archived data stays available for reports and printable transcripts.

Tips & Best Practices

• Set up the academic structure first. If you create a student before defining their class, the Class dropdown will be empty and you'll have to come back.
• Create teachers before students if teachers are also linked to specific students (mentor relationships, advisories), so the connections work in both directions.
• Reuse Joomla users wherever possible. If a parent is also a member of staff (e.g. a teacher whose child attends the school), link both JoomSchool profiles to the same Joomla user — they will use one set of login credentials.
• Keep roll numbers stable within an academic year. Roll number changes mid-year break the marks and attendance import flows. End-of-year promotion is the correct moment to renumber.
• Upload a photo for every user. Several views (ID cards, result sheets, biodata exports) embed the photo. A user without a photo shows a blank silhouette.
• Use bulk import if you're onboarding more than ~20 users.

Troubleshooting