Launchers

A launcher is a disc (or a pill with words) pinned to the window of your public site - like the Search and Reduce motion discs - that opens something when pressed. Make as many as you like at Content > Launchers, put each one wherever you want it, and switch any of them on or off.

What a launcher can open

• A page, a form or a block, in a modal - a page's own words and components on their own, without the navbar or footer, or one of your forms or blocks, in a box over the page. Good for a price list, opening hours, a short "How it works" or a quick enquiry form. Its width runs from Extra small (320px) to Huge (1400px), nearly the full width, or a custom width in pixels or as a share of the window. Its height either fits the page or is fixed (short, medium, tall, nearly full or custom), with a longer page scrolling inside. Full screen fills the whole window.
• A page, a form or a block, in a slideover - a panel from the left or right. Good for an enquiry or booking form: visitors fill it in without leaving the page they are on, and it sends exactly as it does on a page.
• A chat - a chat panel beside the disc (the whole screen on a phone). The bot answers first from your Knowledge entries, and hands over to your team in the Chats inbox when it has no answer. You choose the greeting, the bot's name, whether the bot or your team answer, and when visitors are asked for their name and email.

A page keeps its own rules: a members-only page opens only for members, and a draft never opens. Links in the page open in the main window, so a visitor who follows one leaves the panel behind.

Where it sits

Pick one of eight spots: a corner, the middle of the left or right edge, or the top or bottom centre. Then set how far in from the edges it sits, its size and how round it is. Its tooltip, shown on hover and when a visitor tabs to it, is its label, words of its own, or none. The editor shows a desktop and a phone preview as you change them.

• Launchers step clear of each other and of the page's other floating controls - Search, Back to top, the theme switcher and Reduce motion - so two that share a spot stack neatly instead of overlapping. The one higher in the list sits nearer the edge: drag rows by their grip to change the order.
• Its own spot on phones gives it a different spot, distance and size on screens up to 640px wide - out of the way of a phone's bottom bar, for instance.
• Shows on can keep it to desktops or to phones.

Opening it from a menu or a link

Any menu or sub-menu item can open a launcher: in Content > Menus, edit the item and choose the launcher from the Launcher list under its URL. The editor's Link to open it (#launcher- and the launcher's id) works anywhere else too: a button, a link in a page, or the end of an address, which opens the launcher as the page loads.

Turn off Show a disc on the page for a launcher that should open only from links. Its page and audience rules still apply: on a page where it does not show, its link does nothing.

Which pages, and who sees it

A launcher shows on every page, only on the pages you list, or on every page except those. List one address per line. * matches anything: /blog/* is the blog and everything under it, /shop/*/reviews any product's reviews, /* every page. You can also keep it to signed-in people, or to visitors who are not signed in.

How it looks

By default a launcher takes the theme's primary colour, so it follows light, dark and custom themes. You can pick another theme colour or your own hex colour for the background and for the icon and text, and add your own CSS class names to style it from Custom CSS.

The list

Click a launcher to edit it, or use its switch to turn it on or off. Right-click it (or ⋮, or Shift+F10) to duplicate it, open what it shows in a new tab, or delete it. A copy starts switched off. The sidebar badge counts your launchers and calls out any that are switched on but have nothing to open - those stay off the page until you choose what they open.

Accessibility

Every disc is a real button with the label you gave it, reachable with the keyboard. Escape closes what it opened, and focus goes back to the disc. Nothing about a launcher moves for a visitor who has asked for reduced motion, and launchers are left out when a page is printed.

Switching the Tool off

Launchers is a built-in Tool. Switched off at System > Plugins, no page shows a launcher, but every launcher you made is kept for when it comes back on.