📃Pages

A short written guide introducing Glide Pages and comparing it to Glide Apps

Glide Pages is a new tool that extends the software you can make; from mobile – to desktop and the web. Pages are powered by your Data, just like Glide Apps – but their design and functionality are more attuned to desktop use.

With Pages, you can build beautiful, standalone websites or create multi-app scenarios with numerous Apps and Pages sharing the same database.

If you are totally new to Glide, we suggest learning how to build Glide Apps first. The concepts are slightly easier and this guide assumes you have prior experience with building simple apps.

Differences with Layout

Glide Pages does not have Layouts in the same way as Apps have List Screen Layouts. In other words, every screen in Pages is a Details Screen, and within that screen, we can add all our Components.

So when you create a new Page within your Pages project, it will always be a Details Screen and you have to add Collections to create lists.

However, that Page will still be connected with a table in the Data Editor – even if none of the Components you eventually use on that page reference the data in that table.

Any new Page in your Page will still be connected to a table.

Pages in Pages

In Apps, top-level screens are called 'Tabs'. But within your Page you have Pages. (Yes.. we know it's a bit awkward 😉)

Pages settings

Under each Page's settings, there are two new settings that we can adjust.

Page slug

The Slug is our Page URL. A Slug is the part of a URL that identifies a particular page on a website in an easy-to-read form. In other words, it’s the part of the URL that explains the page’s content. Bear in mind if you change this, any previous links you have shared to a nested Page in your Pages Project will break.

Show in menu

Each Page in a Pages Project shows a checkbox for Show in menu. If we select it only on one Page, when we click on our Web page title on the header, it will redirect us to the page that has the checkbox set as TRUE.

If we set the checkbox to TRUE on two or more pages, we'll find the name of our pages in the menu.

Show in menu

Differences with Components

For now, some components in Pages are still the same as they are in Apps, particularly Entry Fields, Pickers, and Buttons.

Entry fields, pickers and buttons are very similar to Glide Apps components (for now)

Differences with Actions

A significant difference between mobile & desktop is the use of a mouse. Generally, desktop interfaces have more buttons and menus that you can click. Therefore, in Pages, you can create more Actions on individual components.

The Collection Component with top-level actions and a sub-menu

For example, in the Title Component's configuration, you can add many different Actions and these will automatically be added to a submenu when the list gets too long.

We can add many more actions to an individual component

There are some small variations with the individual actions.

For example, the default for list items is to Show Detail Screen. In Pages, we can choose how to display the information by changing our target. We'll find four options to choose from, Current, Main, Small Modal, or Large Modal. The same will apply when we select Show Edit Screen, Show Form Screen, Show New Screen or Show User Profile Screen.

There are likely to be many other little differences that develop over time as Pages and Apps become more distinct from each other.

🧠 If you're keen on a deeper understanding between Pages & Apps, check out this guide on the Navigation Model.