Plantoir

Support

Answers to common questions and issues are collected below. If you run into something not covered here, email support is available.

Getting in touch

Email is right for a question about how to do something, or for anything awkward to describe in public.

An issue on GitHub is right for a fault you can describe in a sentence and reproduce. It's public, so the next teacher who hits the same thing finds the answer.

Plantoir is maintained by one teacher alongside a full teaching load. Replies aren't instant — least of all in September and June — but every report gets read.

The first day

The first build is taking forever. Is it stuck?

Almost certainly not.

The first time you build a site, the app assembles the machinery that does the building. That's a few minutes on a normal connection — some downloading, some building — and longer on a school network. It happens once — every build after that starts in seconds.

The progress view names the step it has reached. As long as that wording keeps changing, work is happening.

Does this need an administrator password?

No. Everything it needs is installed under your own user account, so a school computer you don't have administrator rights on is fine.

One thing worth asking about ahead of time: a school network that filters downloads may block what the app fetches on its first run. Easy workaround – do the initial set up of Plantoir and each course you wish to use at home.

Where do my course files actually live?

In a working folder you choose when the app first runs. An ordinary folder, in an ordinary place, with one folder per course inside it.

You can open it in Obsidian, back it up, and copy it to another computer like anything else.

A page isn't appearing on the site.

Every page carries an instruction saying which classes may see it, and a page you haven't published to a section is left out on purpose.

Ask the assistant what students would see in that section, or open the page and check the settings at the top of it.

If the page should be visible and still isn't, rebuild the preview. The site shows your last build, not the current state of the folder.

Publishing failed.

Publishing needs a working connection and, the first time, permission to reach your hosting account. The message in the section's window says which of those went wrong.

If you entered the account details incorrectly, you can clear them and be asked again.

A failed publish changes nothing for your students. The site that's already live stays live.

Can I keep last year's course?

Yes. Right-click the course and choose Keep a Copy for Reference… before you change it for the new year, or bring in a whole working folder from last year with File ▸ Import Courses for Reference…. Either way the copy sits under Reference Courses in the sidebar, filed by school year.

Its pages are locked, and it is never published — you can read it, preview it and copy pages out of it, and that is all.

If your working folder is in iCloud Drive and you use it on two Macs, update Plantoir on both Macs before you keep a course for reference.

Plantoir says a page could not be read, and it's missing from the site.

The settings block at the top of that page is written in a way the site builder can't read. Rather than guess, the build keeps the page away from students and names it, so nothing is published by mistake.

Open the page, fix the settings at the top, and build again. The page comes back.

My course follows a second curriculum too. Can it have its own coverage map?

Yes. Say you teach AP Computer Science Principles alongside the Ontario course. Make a folder for it in your course — “College Board Curriculum”, for instance — and tick it under Curriculum folders in Course Settings.

Then fill it with one page per expectation, each named by its code alone: 1.A, CRD-1.A and so on. Plantoir doesn't come with these pages, because the framework's wording is yours to bring. Revise with Claude… can draft them for you from the framework you have.

The next time you preview or publish, the course has a second coverage map beside the first, linked from Key Links. Your first map keeps its name.

Can I move a class site somewhere else later?

Yes. The built site is a folder of ordinary web pages, so you can hand it to any host — your school's own web space included.

And the notes it was built from never left your computer, so there's nothing to extract from anywhere.

Sending a useful report

When something goes wrong, the quickest route to a fix is the report the app makes itself.

Choose Report a Problem… from the Help menu. The app asks what to include, saves a file, and then shows you where it put it, so you can read it before it goes anywhere.

What's in it

A record of what the app did and when — courses opened, previews built, sites published, and any errors along the way. That sequence is usually enough to find a fault without asking you to reproduce it.

What's never in it

Anything you wrote on a page. No student names, no assessment, no lesson content — the record notes that a page was published, never what it says. Passwords and account tokens are stripped as the record is written, so what's on disk is already safe to hand over.

What you're asked first

If you've typed anything to the assistant, the app asks whether to include it. Those are your words, so it's your call.

Attach that file to an email, and say what you expected and what happened instead.

What you need

Mac

macOS 15 or later, with Apple silicon. A few gigabytes of free disk space for the site builder, plus whatever your courses need.

Windows

Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). A few gigabytes of free disk space for the site builder, plus whatever your courses need.

Internet

Needed on the first run, and whenever you publish. Writing, building and previewing all work offline. On a Mac, Plantoir also checks once a day for a new version when it can — see Updates.

Hosting

A free hosting account, or a folder on a school web server. The app handles both, and switching later doesn't mean rewriting anything.

Updates

On a Mac, Plantoir checks plantoir.app once a day for a new version. When there is one, it shows you what changed — including anything you need to do first — and asks before installing anything. It never installs while it is publishing, building a preview, or running a scheduled publish: it waits, and finishes once that is done. You can also check any time with Check for Updates… in the Plantoir menu.

On a school-managed Mac

If your account can’t install apps, Plantoir asks for an administrator’s name and password when you choose to install a new version. Your IT department can do it for you, or install new versions themselves.

IT can turn the daily check off for everyone with a configuration profile that sets SUEnableAutomaticChecks to false for ca.russellgordon.Plantoir — or on one Mac with defaults write ca.russellgordon.Plantoir SUEnableAutomaticChecks -bool false. Check for Updates… still works.

Privacy

Your course notes stay on the computer you wrote them on. The app has no accounts and collects no analytics. The one thing it sends on its own is the Mac app’s daily check for a new version, which asks plantoir.app for one file and says only which version of Plantoir is asking — nothing about you or your courses. Updates says how to turn it off.

A site becomes public when you publish a section. Not before.

The assistant runs on your computer as part of the app. What you type to it isn't sent to a service and isn't used to train anything. You can leave it off entirely, and nothing is downloaded for it unless you ask.

Revise with Claude… and Revise with Codex… are different: they open a program you installed and signed in to yourself, and what it reads from your course goes to that company under your own account. Plantoir never sends anything there on its own. A course's How I Teach page is read by those sessions and never published.

Publishing does involve a hosting provider, of course. The account details for it are handed to your computer's own password store rather than left sitting in your course folder.