Custom content on Site Home disappears when editing mode is turned off

[travisgrubert]

Environment

• Academi theme v5.2 (release 2026042900)
• Moodle 5.2.12
• Also reproduced on Moodle 4.5.12 with an earlier Academi build

Steps to reproduce

1. Site administration → Front page → Front page settings
2. Enable "Add custom content" and add content (tested with a linked image and an H5P accordion)
3. Save, view Site Home as admin with editing ON → content displays
4. Turn editing OFF → content disappears
5. Log in as a student (non-editing) → content is not visible at all

Expected behavior
Custom content should display for all users regardless of editing mode.

Actual behavior
Custom content only renders while editing mode is on. It's empty/missing for non-editing admins and students alike.

Diagnostics already ruled out

• Not a permissions/capability issue (fails for admin-with-editing-off too, not just students)
• Switching theme to Boost with no other changes → content displays correctly for students
• Switching back to Academi → issue returns

Regression, not a persistent bug
We have an older Moodle server running Moodle 4.5.0 with Academi v4.5 – 2025010400, where custom content on the home page works fine with no issues. This suggests something changed between that build and the versions above (v4.5-2025010400 → the builds tested on 4.5.12 and 5.2.12) that broke this rendering path.

Likely a template conditional tied to editing mode that only renders the custom content region inside the "editing on" branch — possibly introduced in a change between those releases.

[travisgrubert]

Addendum: This is the same issue reported here: #76
Please note - I immediately tried all suggested fixes from that thread but they did not resolve the problem. For clarity, the suggested fixes were:
• Log in to your Moodle as the site administrator.
• Go to ‘Site Administration > Appearance > Themes‘.
• Click on the edit icon (gear icon) to the right of the ‘Academi’ section that appears.
• Click on the ‘General’ tab.
• In the ‘Custom CSS theme_academi | customcss’ text area, write the SCSS*1 for displaying the front page content.
• Click ‘Save changes’.
• Go to ‘Site administration > Development > Purge caches’.
• Click ‘Purge all caches’.
• Navigate to the site home and check if custom content (e.g. ‘Page’) is displayed.

Also, I assigned roles to each user under Participants.