1. The brief

One sentence, naming the course as a worked example, but the change clearly applied to every course on the site — SARS2s2L was just the easiest place to see it land. The data was already there from the 27 April session; the only missing piece was rendering it on the right page.

2. What was already there

The 27 April session had added a description column to pm_ep_lessons, with an admin editor next to the lesson title and a per-language translation block. The descriptions were rendered as muted grey copy under each lesson title on every course landing page. None of that needed to change. The field was populated, the translation flow was working, and the storage shape was right. The work for today was purely in the lesson viewer — the watch page that opens when a learner clicks a lesson.

3. Where the description should sit on the watch page

The watch page has three vertical zones: the lesson title, the video player, the lesson body. The description is most useful between the title and the video — right where a learner's eyes land before they press play. Put it after the video and they have already started watching; put it inside the video container and it competes with the player chrome. Above the title would push everything else down for what is effectively a sub-headline.

Visually, the panel is a soft grey block with rounded corners and generous padding, in the same restrained palette as the rest of the viewer. Not a loud callout, not an alert — just a clear, quiet line or two of context.

4. Re-using the existing translation pipeline

EP Courses already has a helper, get_translated_field, that reads a per-language override from the lesson's translations JSON if one exists, falling back to the English value if it does not. Lesson titles and lesson bodies already use it. The description should use the same helper for the same reasons: a learner reading a course in isiXhosa should see the isiXhosa description if one has been written, not the English one. There was no need to write a second lookup path or invent a parallel mechanism.

5. The actual code change

Inside the lesson-viewer renderer in plugin.php, three lines were added near the top of the function (where the existing video_url, video_type and lesson_content values are unpacked):

$lesson_description = $this->get_translated_field($current_lesson, 'description', $language);

And then, in the part of the function that builds the HTML for the viewer, between the lesson title and the video block, a small render guard:

if (!empty($lesson_description))
    $html .= '<div class="ep-viewer-description">' . nl2br(htmlspecialchars($lesson_description)) . '</div>';

That is the entire functional change. The htmlspecialchars keeps the panel safe from any markup the editor might paste in; nl2br preserves intentional line breaks the way the rest of the viewer treats lesson copy. The !empty check means lessons without a description never render the wrapper at all, so they look exactly as they did yesterday.

6. A small CSS rule for the panel

One new rule was added to ep-courses-frontend.css for the .ep-viewer-description class — soft grey background, gentle padding, modest border-radius, sat with enough margin to read as its own block but not enough to feel disconnected from the title above and the video below. Nothing fancy: this is a read-once panel that needs to be quiet.

7. Verifying without a learner login

The watch page is gated — only enrolled, logged-in learners can render it — so the usual anonymous fetch trick from the server cannot be used to confirm the visible result. The verification was therefore split: the live plugin.php on the server was inspected to confirm the new lines were in place after upload; the SARS2s2L course's lessons were checked to confirm they had populated descriptions to render; and the surrounding rendering code was traced once more to confirm the new block sits on the path that runs for every viewer call. The render itself needs a logged-in learner to confirm visually.

8. Follow-ups

Two open items, both optional:

• A live look on a real phone, with a learner login, to fine-tune the panel padding and colour against the rest of the viewer.
• Writing isiXhosa descriptions in the per-language translation blocks for the SARS2s2L lessons, so isiXhosa learners see translated copy on the watch page too. The plumbing is in place; this is a copy task, not a code task.