Layouts

What’s a Layout and why should you care?

Layouts are used by both Google Slides and Poexis to define the basic look and feel of a particular page. Layouts provide default elements, such as title, body, text, and image placeholders and are also used to instruct Poexis which application template + layout to use for your app.

In addition, layouts define how a particular app page will render and be visible by the end-user of your app.

Templates contain one or more layouts, you choose your template via the My Poexis dashboard when you set out to build your app. This guide will outline some of the common layouts you will run into during your app-building journey.

Example of a few common layouts in the toollbar.

Title Slide

Your app can optionally contain a maximum of one Title slide. The Title slide provides a few unique characteristics used by your app, these include:

• To set the title for your app. The title, if set on the title slide, is used as part of the app URL and also as the title within your application. If the title text field is not set on the title slide, the document name is used as the title of your app.

• To provide an application logo The Logo is used in various places throughout your app.

• To set the primary color of the app The Primary color will be used in important app elements and defines the color choices in an app. This is done by setting the background color of your title slide

• Optionally, your title slide can contain global stickers, these stickers are then applied to every page within your application.

Example of a Title Slide with markings showing each editable part.

Menu

If your app has more than a few pages or you want to organize your content into various sections (see section header below) then chances are you need or want a menu. A Menu helps to navigate between the sections of your app. A typical mobile app may have a hamburger menu or a bottom navigation bar.

A Menu slide is quite simple to add, simply add a new slide of Layout type Menu and make a new entry in a new line.

When you link a menu entry to a slide it will be added as a link to reach the destination slide in the final app. This means when you click on the Menu, you will be taken to the specified page.

Here is how to link a menu entry with another slide,

Section Header

A Section Header is a specialized slide layout type that can be used to group your app sections together and can also be used to break a link from a link sticker.

To add a Section Header to your app, simply add a new slide and apply the Section Header layout.

The section header is not directly rendered in your app, it is only used as a logical way to group slides and set common properties for that section. These properties can include header titles, background colors, etc.

Adding a section header

When you're designing your menu, feel free to link directly to the section header. Poexis will interpret this as a link to the first slide directly following the section header.

When to use it

You should use the Section Header slide whenever the following are true:

• You need to logically group sections of your app

• You need to break a link sticker

• You want to influence some aspects of the theme design (for example, color). Note that this is dependent on the template itself and will be documented accordingly on a per template basis.