Cast and crew auto-population, the director's note, ad slots, print-to-PDF bleed, the online edition, the photo consent gate, and machine-placed FreeSchoolPlays attribution -- each described on its own.
Cast and crew, auto-populated from the production record
The season board already holds the production record for the show: who is cast in which role, who is crewing which position, and the staff running it. The playbill reads that record instead of asking anyone to type it again -- no separate cast-list spreadsheet, no chasing a stage manager for the final crew count the week of the show. A staff-entered student name is included only after that student's own consent gate clears, the same gate a production photograph passes through; an unconsented student's name is left off entirely, not abbreviated or initialed. Staff and adult role assignments -- director, choreographer, music director, technical director -- are program data and are not gated the way a minor's name is.
The director's note
A playbill is not only a roster: the director's note is where the show gets its context, and that stays a section a director writes by hand, not something pulled from a record. It sits beside the auto-populated cast and crew section and the scene and musical-number breakdown, so the whole program comes from one workspace instead of a note pasted in from a separate document at the last minute.
Program ad slots for local sponsors
A printed program is one of the few pieces of paper a theatre program's whole audience actually reads, and that has real value to a local sponsor. The playbill lays out ad slots sized for a local business card or a quarter-page message, with a school revenue share, in the same document as the cast list rather than a separate insert. Collecting a sponsor's payment runs through the platform's shared, honest-off payment rail, same as the box office -- no card is charged by this page, and selling an ad slot today is a conversation with the school, not a live checkout.
Print-to-PDF at your print shop's bleed margins
A program that looks right on screen and prints wrong at the edges costs a reprint. The export composes the finished playbill to a print-ready PDF at the bleed margins a print shop expects, so the file that leaves the platform is the file the print shop actually needs -- not a screen-sized document a volunteer has to reformat by hand first.
An online edition for a phone during intermission
Not every family wants a paper program, and a paper program left in a coat pocket is one nobody can find again after opening night. The online edition is a link a family opens on their own phone -- no app to download and no separate account to create -- built from the exact same production record as the print export, so the two never drift apart into two different casts.
The consent gate on a student photo -- fail-closed, not admin-configurable
Any student photograph used in the program passes through the same consent gate as the rest of the platform: it clears the gate, or it does not go in the program, ever. That gate fails closed by construction -- it is not a toggle in an admin settings screen, and there is no school-level override that places an unconsented photo. The same posture holds for a student's name in the cast or crew list, described above: consent-gated, fail-closed, staff-entered from the production record, never a public or searchable roster.
Machine-placed FreeSchoolPlays attribution
For a title performed from the FreeSchoolPlays catalog, the required attribution credit is placed on the program by the same engine that builds the rest of it, not typed in by a volunteer who has to remember the exact wording. It is a fail-closed guard, not a checklist item: a program built from a FreeSchoolPlays title cannot be exported or published without that credit attached.