Mobile App Menu

Your program's menu lives at Design & Content › Menu in the admin. One page now drives the menu everywhere fans see it — the app, the SDK and the web — so there is no longer a separate menu to maintain for each one.

The page holds two tables. Main Menu at the top is your menu items. Menu Links sits below it. On the right, a live Preview shows the menu the way fans see it, and it re-draws as you drag rows around.

Main Menu

Each row shows the item's Icon, its Display Name, and its Target — the system page, custom page or external URL it opens.

Drag the handle at the left of a row to change the order. There's nothing to submit: you'll see Saving order… and then Order saved above the table.

Tip: Choose your order wisely! The first 3 items get top billing in the fan menu. Everything else lives under the ☰ menu.

A Default badge marks the page fans land on when they open your program. An Inactive badge — and a dimmed row — marks an item that's switched off. Inactive items don't appear in the menu, and the preview drops them too, so you can see the real result before you leave the page.

Note: System items shouldn't be deleted and can only be added back by Fanmaker's technical team. If you want one out of the menu, uncheck Active on it instead of removing it. Items that can't be deleted simply don't offer a Delete button.

Creating a new menu item

1. Click New Menu Item.

2. Display Name. What fans read in the menu. Keep it short — 30 characters is the limit, and short labels sit better beside an icon.

3. Icon. Pick the one that best fits the item. Both the Icon column and the preview draw your choice exactly as the fan app draws it, so you can tell at a glance whether it renders.

4. Type.

• Internal (custom page) — opens a Custom Page you've already built in Fanmaker. Choose it from the Custom Page dropdown underneath.

• External URL — opens another website. Enter the address in External URL.

• Parent (group) — groups other items underneath it.

5. For an External URL you can also tick Open in external browser, which sends fans out to their phone's browser instead of showing the page inside the app.

6. Tick Active to put the item into the menu, and Default page if this should be where fans land.

7. Click Create Menu Item.

Note: An External URL can't be set as the default page. Setting any other item as the default automatically clears the flag from whichever item held it before, so switch the default over rather than trying to clear it.

Editing and deleting

Edit on any row opens the same fields; Save Changes applies them. Delete removes the item, with a confirmation first.

Why an external link sometimes opens outside the app anyway

After you save an external item, Fanmaker checks whether the destination allows itself to be displayed inside the app and reports what it found under the External URL field the next time you open Edit. Plenty of sites refuse to be embedded — when that's the case the link opens in the external browser regardless of how you set Open in external browser. If the check itself fails, saving the item again retries it.