The Platform Manual

You can use everything without an account

The moment you open the site you can read every lesson, play the alphabet game, walk through wudu step by step, and browse the classes. Nothing you do is sent anywhere: your progress is saved on your own device only, and no record of you exists on our side. This is not a limited trial mode; it is the normal way to start.

An account exists for exactly one reason: so your progress can follow you to another device. If you only ever use one phone, you may never need one.

Finding your way around

"How to pray, right now"

The button on the home page is there for one moment: prayer is in twenty minutes and you do not know what to do. It gives you enough to pray tonight, immediately: face the qiblah, move when you hear Allahu akbar, say SubhanAllah in each position. That is genuinely acceptable while you are learning; your teachers taught it this way long before there was an app. Below it sits the full ladder you will climb at your own pace.

Lessons, rings, and days walked

The Learn page shows one recommended next step at a time, never a wall of choices. Under it, six rings show what you can do so far: wudu, prayer postures, Al-Fatihah, a short surah, foundations, attendance.

Some lessons end with a button you cannot press: "Show a teacher". That is deliberate. Reading instructions off a screen cannot tell you whether the words are coming out right; one person listening once can. Those steps unlock when a teacher confirms them, in class or on a call, and they are the whole reason this platform exists. Once confirmed, it shows as done on your own Learn page, no button of yours to press; finishing every lesson and having at least one of these confirmed is also a second way to earn your certificate of participation, alongside simply attending enough classes.

The alphabet

• Meet the letters: all 28, laid out right to left, the direction Arabic is read. Tap any letter to hear its name, with a plain-English anchor ("kh as in Scottish loch") and its look-alike family, the letters that differ only by dots.
• Play the path: five-tap lessons in a winding path, stars for accuracy, steps for progress. No hearts, no lives, no way to lose your place: a wrong answer just waits for you to look again.

Some letter sounds are native-speaker recordings, the rest use a studio voice for now; the teacher's own voice will replace them all.

Creating your place (an account)

On the register page you give a name (any name you like, it does not have to be your legal one), an email, and you tick permissions:

Once box 2 is ticked, you are also asked where you are starting: Just exploring, New Muslim, Returning to practice, or Been Muslim a while. It is optional and skippable, and it only helps us know where to start you. Choosing Just exploring carries the same promise as the teacher's queue below: nobody ever chases you.

Then a six-digit code arrives by email. It works once and expires in fifteen minutes. Type it in, and if box 2 is ticked your progress from this device carries over and your step count never goes down when you sign up; without box 2, that progress simply stays on this device. The email comes from a plain address and does not name the organisation, in case someone else sees your inbox.

Which prayer instruction should we show you?

The covering required during prayer differs for men and women, so the pictures differ. You choose: Brothers, Sisters, Show me both, or Not sure yet (which shows no body imagery at all and suggests a word with a teacher). This is a display choice, not a question about who you are, and you never have to answer it.

Classes

The Classes page shows the real weekly classes with live seat counts. Registering needs an account. When you register:

• If the class is taught separately for brothers and sisters, you can say which session you are coming to, or choose not to say; a coordinator will sort it out with you personally.
• A confirmation email arrives with a calendar file for your phone. Neither names the organisation.
• You can cancel any time from the same page, which frees your seat.

Happening elsewhere lists talks and gatherings around Perth chosen by hand by our team. The line under each one, "Listed for information. Al-Rafeeq is not the organiser", means exactly that.

Your certificate of participation

There are two ways to earn one. The first: attend enough of a class's sessions, worked out from real attendance, never guessed. The second: finish every lesson in the course and have a teacher confirm at least one "Show a teacher" step, on top of having attended at least once. Either way your teacher issues it from their own screen, with you present, asking exactly how your name should read on it. You get an email with a private link (unless you told us you are "just exploring", in which case no email goes out at all: your teacher hands you the link directly). It certifies that you attended, never that you are competent at anything, and never anything about worship, whichever way you earned it.

From your own certificate page you can rename it at any time, or remove your name entirely (it then reads "Name withheld" to anyone who sees it). If you ever delete your account, your name disappears from this record on its own: the class, the date, and the fact that a certificate was issued all stay, but nothing on it will name you again. The page prints A4, landscape, straight from your browser.

The library

The Library page turns the books our teaching team uses in class into short tap-through lessons: pick a lesson, move one step at a time, and finish in a few minutes. There are four so far: the practical method of wudhu, ghusl, salaah and tayammum as taught in class, forty short teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, on how to live, everyday fiqh, covering cleanliness, personal hygiene, wudhu and the five pillars of Islam, and Basic Aqaaid, the core beliefs of Islam. Each reading also offers itself as one long page for anyone who prefers plain text. Using the library needs no account and adds nothing to any learner profile.

Your data, your choices

• As a guest: we hold nothing about you. Everything lives on your device, and clearing it there ends it.
• With an account: we hold your name, email, permissions, lesson progress, and class registrations. Stored in Australia (Sydney).
• Settings: a signed-in account has its own settings page, linked from the header. From there you can withdraw box 2 on its own (see below) or erase everything.
• Withdrawing box 2: removes the lessons you have done and your prayer-instruction choice from our server, and clears that permission, without touching box 1 or your account itself. Your device keeps its own copy of your progress regardless; it just stops syncing to your account until you grant the permission again.
• Erasing: removes your account and everything attached to it, immediately, unconditionally, with no "are you sure you really want to" and no one contacting you about it. Your class registrations disappear from the teachers' lists in the same moment. Your device keeps its own copy of your progress regardless.

Roles, and who sees what

The session-group difference is deliberate, not an oversight: which session a learner attends is between them and their coordinator, so plain teacher accounts see names without groups. Please do not work around this by asking learners in front of others.

Signing in is the same email-code flow learners use. There are no passwords for anyone, including you.

The Needs Attention queue

The first thing you see on the admin page. It lists learners who may need a human, most urgent first:

Two buttons per row: Contacted after you have actually reached out (the learner leaves the queue for seven days), and Snooze for when you know why they are away (seven days, no contact recorded).

A row can also appear because of a Missed sessions chip, separate from the bands above: a learner who missed the last two in-person sessions of a class they are enrolled in or registered for shows up even with no band at all, because they are otherwise active online. That is the exact person the register exists to catch: someone who signed up, came once, then quietly stopped walking through the door while still opening lessons on their phone. The same suppressions apply identically: exploring, snooze, and recent contact all suppress the missed chip too.

Class rosters

On its own page, /admin/classes: each class with its registrations. Names for everyone; session groups only for coordinators and the super admin. A learner who cancels disappears on their own action; a learner who erases their account disappears from everything.

Each class links to two things: Mark roll, the mobile screen a teacher actually uses in the musallah on a phone (one tap per person, Present or Absent, an "Add a walk-in" field, and a visible "N marks not saved" queue if the signal drops so a tap is never silently lost); and Print roll, the same A4 paper backstop as before for a session with no reception at all. Typing in a paper roll afterwards works from the same mobile screen, behind an "Entering from paper" switch, so a late entry is honestly recorded as a later entry, never backdated to look like it happened live. Each learner row on Mark roll also carries three small skill chips, one per "Show a teacher" step (Wudu, Prayer postures, Al-Fatihah): an already-confirmed one shows as a tick, the rest stay tappable Verify buttons. A tap confirms it permanently, right there while the learner is standing in front of you. A wrong tap is corrected by a super admin only, with a reason on record, not undone from this screen.

Both surfaces, and the roster list itself, show the same people: everyone enrolled in the class, everyone registered for that session, and anyone already marked present or absent, including a walk-in from a previous visit who is not formally enrolled. Registrations alone are no longer the whole list.

Coordinators (not plain teachers) also see an Attendance sheet per class: a term-long grid, one row per learner, one column per session, with a CSV download for the organisation's own records. It is the one place a term of individually marked rolls turns into the actual answer: who is still coming.

Certificates

On its own page, /admin/certificates, a Certificates ready section lists every learner who qualifies and does not have a certificate yet, by either route: attended enough sessions of a class, the threshold worked out from real attendance, never a number you type in; or finished every lesson and had at least one "Show a teacher" step confirmed, alongside having attended at least once. The row tells you which way they qualified. Confirm the name with the learner, then tap Issue; the row disappears once it is done. A learner marked "just exploring" still appears here (earning what you attend is not the same as being chased for it), but the section tells you plainly that no email will go out for them: hand them the link yourself.

Each class also links to a Certificate eligibility page: who qualifies, who is exactly one session short and why, on screen only, nothing to export or print here. A learner who is one session short but marked "just exploring" is left off that list on purpose; nobody gets nudged toward attendance they never signed up for.

Revoking a certificate is a super admin action taken from the certificate's own page, and it asks for a reason first. It is permanent: a revoked certificate cannot be re-issued from this queue, and the learner sees an honest "no longer available" message rather than a broken link.

Community listings ("Happening elsewhere")

The management section lets you add a listing: title, where, when, and an optional detail line (put the event's link and one line on why it is worth going). Times are Perth times; enter them as you would say them.

Class events cannot be hidden from here: a hidden class would strand its registered learners, so classes are managed separately (ask the technical team the first time).

What staff accounts deliberately cannot do

• See a learner's session group without the coordinator role
• See learner emails in the attention queue
• Override the exploring suppression
• Approve religious content: publishing runs through a separate reviewer capability held by the Shaikhs, which no administrative role includes, by design

Six promises, each one enforced by the system itself, not by policy documents.

• No passwords exist. Sign-in codes are single-use and short-lived. There is no password to steal, reuse, or reveal that someone has an account here.
• Guests genuinely leave no trace. Until you create an account, the platform makes no record of you at all. An automated test counts every row in the database, walks through the guest experience, and fails the build if any count moved.
• The data kept is deliberately minimal. No gender field exists anywhere; the platform stores a display preference instead, which never has to be answered. There is no record of whether or when anyone converted, and the database is built so one cannot be added quietly. Consent is stored as a fingerprint of the exact wording agreed to.
• Nothing watches you learn. No analytics, no trackers, no third-party code on any learning page. Nobody can see how long you lingered on a sensitive lesson.
• Everything lives in Australia. The database runs in Sydney.
• Completion is earned, not clicked. Walkthroughs require every step to be seen; the prayer-check steps require a human teacher. The system is built so it cannot tell you that you can pray when you cannot.

Over a hundred automated tests run on every change, and several exist purely to protect the promises above. If one fails, the change cannot ship.

Video lessons and recitation audio (waiting on filming and recording), donations, notifications, and the native phone apps. A learner's own view of their own attendance (the register above is a staff tool for now); a certificate arrives by email and its own private link, not through a page listing your attendance history. The old website's information pages (What is Islam, FAQ) have not moved over yet either. Each arrives as its own well-tested piece, the same way everything above did.