Crunch’s folders are a great way of organizing your datasets and are important for access management. Sharing a folder is Crunch’s recommended way of giving access to users, and with the Folder Homepages feature, you can make that folder view a great landing page for new and existing users.
Folder Homepages can contain images, formatted text, embedded videos, and links to other resources to give a more branded feel to Crunch as well as aiding navigation to other resources such as terms and conditions, allowing you to tailor the experience for your users when they arrive into Crunch.
Here’s an example of a Folder Homepage you could create:
Examples of usage
Expected use cases for these homepages include:
- Privacy notices and other terms & conditions, perhaps including links to external documents
- Text that guides the visitor to navigate the folders and sub-folders to be found within, perhaps including shortcut links to particular resources
- Promotional text, images, and/or videos for other products and services that you offer (an opportunity for cross-selling) including links to further information
- Branding, including logos, for you and/or your end client
- A welcome message that greets the user
- Hints and tips for using Crunch - "Did you know...?" - style feature reminders, or even training videos.
- Fieldwork information - perhaps talking about the periodicity of a tracker and when the next update is due
- Who to reach out to for help and advice - main research contacts at your organization, perhaps including direct mailto: links
- Instructions to *internal* users for how to manage the contents - dos and don'ts - as specified by DP departments for example
Folder Homepages are customizations of Crunch’s existing folder listings pages. A regular folder listing can become a Folder Homepage by the addition of one or more Rich-text tiles or video tiles. When a Folder Homepage is added, the top area of the screen is made available for placing these tiles, and the regular folder listing will then appear directly below. Adding content to these tiles, resizing them, and laying them out is done via an Edit mode very similar to editing a dashboard. See below for full details on how to create and edit Folder Homepages.
Creating Folder Homepages
Navigate to the folder for which you want to add a Folder Homepage. Only editors are able to create or edit Folder Homepages, although anyone with editor or viewer access to the folder can see them. Click the name of the folder in the header to open the main folder menu. From that menu, choose “Create folder homepage”.
This will move the folder contents down and create a customizable area at the top of the page. It will also automatically create a single tile for you with some default content.
Adding additional tiles
Additional rich-text tiles can be added by clicking on the “Add tile” button in the header and choosing “Add rich-text tile”. This will create a new blank tile (likewise for adding a new video tile). Folder Homepages can consist of as many tiles as you want. You can move a tile to a new position just by dragging-and-dropping it, and tiles can be resized by clicking and dragging on the triangle in the bottom right corner of each tile. Both moving and resizing automatically snaps to the grid of squares to ensure a neat and tidy layout.
Editing tiles
Both blank tiles and tiles with existing content can be edited by hovering over a tile (while in edit mode) and choosing the “Edit tile” option that appears. For rich-text tiles, this opens a slide-in panel that contains a What-you-see-is-what-you-get editor that supports both formatted text and images. Images can be specified in any of these ways:
- Copy-and-paste, directly into a tile
- Uploading
- Specifying a URL where an image is already hosted
Tiles can also have an optional title, which appears in larger text as a heading, but you are also able to leave this field blank (useful for tiles that contain logos, for example).
Video tiles offer a simpler edit screen where you can specify a tile title (optional) and a video URL (required). The video can be hosted on a commercial platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, or hosted on a private web server.
Deleting tiles
Tiles can be deleted by entering Edit mode and hovering over a tile. This will show a “Delete tile” button. Clicking this button will delete the current tile.
Removing a Folder Homepage
Existing Folder Homepages can be removed in either of these ways:
- From the main folder dropdown menu, choose “Remove folder homepage” and confirm the “Are you sure?” message.
- Delete each of the tiles currently in the Folder Homepage. A Folder Homepage with no tiles is automatically removed.
We’d love your feedback at support@crunch.io