Campus Placement Engine v0.1.0-alpha.5

Campus Placement Engine v0.1.0-alpha.5

The fifth public alpha makes the self-hosted Engine easier to evaluate and gives
its release process materially stronger browser, accessibility, and upgrade
evidence. It remains independently usable without Campus Placement Cloud.

What changed

• A pinned Playwright and axe-core release harness now exercises the installed,
  server-rendered Engine in Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit before publication.
  It covers authentication, role boundaries, protected routes, every key
  administrator screen, public aggregates, board preferences, keyboard focus,
  narrow screens, zoom, reduced motion, forced colours, and serious/critical
  accessibility findings using synthetic records only.
• Board auto-refresh is now visible, pausable, and announced without forced HTML
  meta refresh. Forms discovered by the browser pass now have explicit labels,
  and top-bar contrast meets the automated release gate.
• CI and release download the exact immutable alpha.4 archive and prove a
  backup-first upgrade preserves institution, account, candidate, company, and
  application rows while converging to the exact current migration history.
• The public site now leads with candidate placement outcomes, includes a
  captioned walkthrough recorded from the real synthetic Engine, and offers a
  clear university-pilot path. The repository adds a short installation guide,
  deployment examples, and adopter FAQ.
• Release artifacts and GitHub Pages outputs retain bounded contents, fixed
  checksums, generated-only demonstrations, and no runtime state or credentials.

Upgrade from alpha.4 or earlier

Preserve the current database, data/, runtime configuration, and verified
backups. Replace only application files with the verified alpha.5 package, then
run:

php placement upgrade
php placement doctor
php placement readiness

The upgrade command creates and verifies a pre-migration backup before applying
new migrations. Never delete migration or ownership rows to force an upgrade.

Browser qualification boundary

The automated release matrix uses Linux Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. A real
Safari and representative assistive-technology pass remains part of the
deployment checklist because an engine-equivalent browser run is not the same
evidence as the target operating system, browser, and screen reader.

Release boundary

This is still an evaluation alpha. It does not claim that a particular
university's privacy, security, accessibility, capacity, recovery, or support
requirements are satisfied. A production deployment requires institution
approval, a successful rehearsal, encrypted offsite backups, an isolated
restore drill, monitored TLS and workers, named incident ownership, and
provider-specific evidence.

If CPE_POSTGRES_TLS_TEST_URL is absent, this evaluation-alpha release may skip
live negotiated-TLS evidence and must report that omission. Beta, release-
candidate, stable, malformed, and other tag classes continue to fail publication
without that production-shaped endpoint evidence.