Finding a setting
Settings has grown past the point where anyone remembers which pane a given switch lives on. The search box above the Settings tabs is the answer: type what you are looking for and the page turns into results in place — you stay on Settings, nothing new opens — listing the settings, permissions and records that match. Click a result and Settings opens the right pane and takes you to the control, highlighted so you can see which one it meant.
Anyone who can open Settings can use it. If your role has no Settings access at all, there is no search box to find, because there is no Settings page.
Three ways to search
- By what it is called. "Vigil", "quiet hours", "fallback words".
- By what it does. "who can send email", "stop a large send", "turn off a module" — the description and the wording on the control are searched too, not just its name.
- By what it is set to. Search a staff member's name, a site's name, a policy's wording, an email address. Vianney reads the current values, so a setting can be found by its answer rather than its question.
Two dropdowns sit beside the box for narrowing a broad search: Kind (a toggle, a choice, a number, a permission, a record, and so on) and Subject (People & access, Parish & sites, Liturgy, Communications & sending, and the rest). Each only ever offers you the options that actually have results you are allowed to see. Reset all clears everything and puts Settings back as it was.
What counts as a "record"
Alongside the settings themselves, search reaches eight kinds of Settings record: staff, cluster staff, portal accounts, SMS opt-ins, text-intake routes, worship sites, policies, and your own connected account. Parishioners are not among them — the parish directory has its own search, on the People page.
You only see what you could already see
Every result is checked on its own against the same rules that decide which Settings tabs appear for you. Search is never a way round a permission: it can only ever show you something you could have found by clicking through the panes yourself. Someone who cannot open Staff & teams will not reach a staff member through search; someone without Stewardship will not surface giving settings.
What you type stays on the page
Search phrases are not put in the address bar, not kept in your browser history, and not written to any log or to the audit trail. Nothing records what you went looking for. Clearing the box puts Settings back exactly as it was.
Two things findable by name but not by value
The Safe Environment level on the staff roster and the Canva connection can be found by name, but not by what they are currently set to — search will take you to the right place and you read the value there. Mass-music presets behave the same way until you have opened the Parish pane once in that visit; after that they are searchable by their contents too.
Tips
- Press / for the global search in the top bar, which jumps to people and pages; the Settings box is the one for settings themselves.
- If a result's control has moved or gone, Vianney says so plainly and runs the search again rather than dropping you somewhere wrong.
- Not finding something you are sure exists usually means your role cannot reach that pane — see Who can do what: the role access matrix.