Starting pages

Starting pages can be used to create an overview of the section or the whole help instance and navigate a user through it. You can group multiple topics dedicated to a specific subject under such page.

They provide design and markup for highlighting the most useful and popular topics of a section or instance.

Also, they are a better alternative to wrapper topics since they are not empty, which is good for SEO.

For consistency reasons, starting pages have a fixed layout. For predefined groups, you can change the number of cards and their content. You can also add custom card and link groups and adjust their width.

Create a starting page

To create an empty starting page, create a topic and add the section-starting-page tag as a child of the topic tag.
If the section-starting-page tag is present on a page, all other content elements are ignored.
All links on a starting page must either point to topics with a summary or have the summary attribute.
To create a starting page already filled with all the possible elements, which you can then remove or edit as you want, start creating a topic from a template and select Section starting page template type.

Starting page structure

The section-starting-page content structure can look like this:

<section-starting-page> <title>Section starting page title</title> <description> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis. </description> <spotlight> <a href="Topic1.topic" description="Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis" type="start"/> <a href="Topic2.topic" description="Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis" type="search"/> ... </spotlight> <primary> <title>Main group</title> <a href="Topic.topic" description="Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis"/> ... </primary> <secondary> <title>Highlighted group</title> <a href="Topic.topic" description="Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis"/> ... </secondary> <misc> <cards> <title>Custom cards</title> <a href="Topic.topic" description="Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis"/> ... </cards> <links narrow="true"> <group> <title>Custom links</title> <a href="Topic.topic" description="Sed condimentum feugiat sagittis"/> ... </group> ... </links> </misc> </section-starting-page>

primary and secondary groups are mandatory, spotlight and misc are optional. spotlight must contain exactly two links with icons.

Since on starting pages a certain structure is expected, we provide you a template containing all the elements, so you can create a starting page from template, add links to topics and remove everything you don't need.

Groups

Links on a starting page have to be divided into groups.

Use the spotlight tag to highlight the most useful and popular topics of a section. The type attribute defines the card's icon.

Place other important topics in the primary and secondary groups. These groups are mandatory.

If necessary, use the misc section to add more relevant cards or links.

Add other relevant cards or links

Under the misc tag, add either cards or links.
Add the title tag or attribute.
For links, wrap each set of links with the group tag and add a title for each group.
Define links to relevant topics.
If necessary, specify the width of groups.
Add narrow="true" to a group if you want to render three narrow columns. By default, it is false, and groups are rendered in two columns.

Last modified: 07 November 2023