Connector · CAP
Stanford Profiles
Faculty and staff profiles from CAP, so people pages stay current without retyping.
Stub. Not built, not tested. Stanford Profiles is backed by CAP (cap.stanford.edu), which has an API. A lab or department people page is the most common thing on a Stanford site, and the most often out of date. Pulling from Profiles keeps it current from the source people already maintain.
Verified
Nothing yet beyond what SWS has reported: CAP has an API and Stanford sites connect to it.
Not yet known
- How access is granted. Expect issued credentials, requested from CAP’s owners. This is unconfirmed. If credentials are needed, they go in Actions secrets, never in the repository or the build. A static site cannot call an authenticated API from the browser without publishing the credential, which is why the fetch has to happen at build time.
- The endpoints, the fields, and how to select a group’s members.
- Which fields are public. Profiles content is about people. Publish only what the person has already made public on their Stanford Profile. If a field is not public there, it does not go on the site. If a site would show more than that, it is a privacy question, and the door is the University Privacy Office.
- Photo alt text. Whether the API supplies any. The person’s name alone is usually not enough, and the checks will flag a missing alt.
- Who owns the API, and the terms for depending on it.
Likely shape
Per standards/connectors/README.md: a scheduled Action authenticates with
secrets, fetches the group’s profiles, writes src/data/people.json with the
public fields only, and commits it. Each person links to their Stanford
Profiles page.
This pairs with the lab or research group starter prompt. People pages could come from Profiles instead of one hand-written file per person. Students and visitors often have no profile, so expect to mix the two.
What to do now
- Say this connector is a stub and access has not been confirmed.
- Do not scrape profile pages as a substitute.
- Until access is confirmed, keep people as files in the repository and link each person to their Stanford Profile.