Custom homepage

Clause9 allows you to create custom home pages for your users through the Homepage tab of the Admin section. You can even differentiate between different departments (groups) or individual users.

Tiles versus homepages

In order to create custom home pages, you will first have to understand the difference between tiles and homepages. Understanding both concepts is crucial to understand how you can fine-tune home pages, while at the same time maximizing reuse of elements across different homepages.

• A tile is a reusable part of a custom home page. Different types of tiles can be created (e.g., a video tile, a text tile, a tile with a list of Q&As, etc.). You can create an unlimited amount of tiles, and each tile can then end up in zero, one or more pages. Note that creating a tile on itself does not do anything — you really have to assign it to at least one homepage in order for it to be useful.

• A homepage consists of a set of tiles. You can create an unlimited number of homepages, and then assign it to one or more specific users and/or Clause9 groups. You can also set a homepage as your organisation’s default custom homepage.

Creating tiles

To create a tile, you click on the button and then select one of the tile types:

Tile type	Description
Image	Shows an image (e.g., a photo or logo) inside the tile. The image can either be taken from a URL (e.g., https://www.yourcompany.com/logo.jpg) or from an image file uploaded to the Clause9 platform. If you want, you can specify the exact dimensions of the file, in pixels. Note that it is not necessary to specify both a width and a height — depending on your image, one of the two may also suffice. Tip: the image at the top left (in the Clause9 menu bar) can currently only be changed by Clause9 staff members. Please contact us if you intend to do so.
Video	Shows an embedded videoplayer. Currently only YouTube and Vimeo are supported. Tip: If you use another video platform, you may want to try the IFrame option below.
Text	Allows you to insert one or more paragraphs of text, if desired with subdivisions and styling.
Specific files	Shows a list with hand-picked files (of any kind).
Recent files	Shows a list of all recently used (i.e., opened or saved) files, of any type: Q&A template, Q&A answer sets, documents or binders. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
Available Q&As	Shows a list of all Q&As available to the user. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
Recent Q&As	Shows a list of all recently used (i.e., opened or saved) Q&As. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
Recent answers	Shows a list of all recently used (i.e., opened or saved) Q&A answer sets.
Available Documents & Binders	Shows a list of all documents and binders that are available to the user. Optionally you can limit this to only templates. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
Recent Documents & Binders	Shows a list of all recently used (i.e., opened or saved) documents and binders. Optionally you can limit this to only templates. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
Magic links	This will only be shown for anonymous users. It shows the list of all Q&As that are included in the magic link.
Inbox	Shows the list of messages sent to the current user, e.g. documents that were prepared and need to be reviewed by some other person, as shown in the example below. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
Platform messages	Shows the messages that are occasionally sent by the Clause9 team to all its users, for example announcing new features. An example is shown below. Note: this tile will be automatically hidden for anonymous users.
IFrame	Advanced. Shows an embedded webpage at the specified URL. This allows you to, for example, embed parts of your intranet.
Custom programming	Advanced. Allows you to insert Clojure-based custom programming code.

For each tile, you are strongly advised to fill in the title of this tile, as this title is not only shown towards the end user (in the top left corner of each tile, except if actively disabled through the “Hide title towards the end-user” option), but is also used in several places in the administration module.

For each tile, you can specify additional options by pressing the button. Note that each of those options will apply to each of the tiles you include on each of the custom home pages.

Visibility	Allows you to specify a start date and/or expiry date for the tile. This allows you to, for example, specify a Christmas greeting upfront, and only display it during the holiday period. Note that the tile will not be deleted after its expiry; it will simply not be displayed towards the user.
Alignment	Allows you to specify how content should be aligned. This is currently only relevant for images.
Border	Allows you to specify a border around the tile.
Background color	Allows you to specify the background color of a tile.

Creating a custom home page

After you have created one or more tiles, you can assign them to one or more custom home pages.

Each custom home page consists of three sections: a header, a body part and a footer. The header and the footer section always span the full width of the browser, while the body section can contain up to three columns (left, middle and right).

Each section can contain zero, one or more tiles. Those tiles will be displayed below each other within the section.

For example, in the screenshot below, the three sections are indicated with a red dotted border. The header section contains a logo, the footer section contains a copyright claim, and the body section contains two columns (left and right, indicated with a green dotted border). The left column contains a single tile with a welcome text, while the right column contains two tiles (with a video and received messages).

For each custom home page, you can specify a number of options:

Background color	The background color of the entire home page (with the exception of Clause9's menu bar at the top).
Tile titles	Allows you to specify the color and the font size of the optional title of each tile. Note that individual tiles can hide their title through the “Hide title towards the end-user” setting.
Body position	If you check the “Stretch body tiles” option, then Clause9 will ensure that the body section (i.e. the part in the middle) will be either vertically expanded (when there not enough content to fill the entire browser page) or vertically compressed (when there is too much content, in which case most browsers will show scroll bars at the right side of the body section). This will also cause the footer tiles to be shown at the very bottom of the browser page.
Refresh button	Allows you to hide the refresh button, which is normally shown in the upper right corner of the home page to enable end-users to refresh the contents of the custom home page.
Margins	Allows you to set the inner margins of the home page, the external margins of each tile (i.e., around each tile) and the inner margins of each tile.

Assigning custom home pages

You can create several home pages, and then assign home pages at three different levels:

• at the level of the customer (organisation) — set in the Defaults tab of the Admin section. Note that this also assigns the custom home page to the anonymous users within the customer (see the “Tips, tricks & caveats” below.)

• at the level of a group of users (often a department) — set in the Defaults tab of that particular group

• at the level of an individual user — set in the Defaults tab of that particular user, as shown in the screenshot below.

All three levels are combined, so as to determine which custom home page (if any) will be shown for a particular user:

• First, it will be checked whether a custom home page was assigned at the customer level for the customer (organisation) to which the user belongs.

• Next, it will be checked whether a custom home page wass assigned to one of the groups of which the user is a member. If one is found, then that custom home page will take precedence over the customer level’s home page.

• Finally, it will be checked whether a custom home page was assigned to that particular user. If so, then that custom home page will always take precedence over the one assigned at the group or customer level.

Notes:

• If no custom home page applies, the default home page will be shown.

• If a user is a member of multiple groups, and several of those groups have a custom home page assigned to them, then it is unpredictable which home page will actually be shown. This is a scenario you obviously want to avoid.

Tips, tricks and caveats

• You are strongly advised to open Clause9 in two different browsers: one with the admin account, and one with a user for whom the homepage is being created. You can then easily test the changes you’ve made.

• To make testing changes even easier: either hit the refresh button in the top right corner of the actual user’s home page, or Shift-click on the upper-left button. The changes will then be immediately loaded, without you having to actually refresh the user’s browser page.
• Be aware that assigning a custom home page at the level of a customer, also assigns it to the anonymous users within that customer, which will in a lot of cases not be your intention. Of course, you have the possibility to assign a special anonymous-users-only custom home page to the anonymous user accounts. Also, as a precaution, when a custom home page completely lacks a a “magic link” pane, it will not be shown towards anonymous users (to avoid that an external link would become completely broken.)