Mastering your master page

When you are responsible for creating playlists and are working within MagicINFO, you probably already are enthusiastic about the master page function. If you are not familiar with that feature yet, keep on reading. Because once you become a master of your master page, keeping up uniformity in your playlist has never been so easy and every page will look as tight as an artificially grown pineapple.

What is it, and why is it there? 

To create an eye-catching playlist in the Web Author, you can design each page with unique content and start from scratch with every page. However, using the master page will save you time when you want a certain element to return on each page. It's the very first page of your playlist (page number 0) and in MagicINFO 8 it is known as the "global page". The master or global page is the page that you can create with default elements. It's sort of the same as a template, but only with one important difference; with static background templates you can't use dynamic content. But by using the global page as a template, you can. 

How you can use it?

To create depth

Every item on the global page is solid in the background on every following page. So with that, you can create depth in the following pages by putting other items on top. When you don't have designed templates available you can simply work with shapes to have some colored blocks and a logo on the global page. Then it's just adding the specific text, elements, and images on the following pages and keep on creating.  

To have a newsfeed on each page

Digital signage is often used for keeping everybody up to date with the latest news. So it's good to know that you don't need to add an RSS feed on every single page. Just create your news feed on the global page and you're sure that everybody knows about what's going on in the world. 

To have a source picture in picture

Why not add a picture to the picture channel on your global page? Just add another source such as HDMI or TV so you can have all your functional information shown and still watch the football game that's on TV.

To provide everybody with the right time and date

When your message is not that interesting just add a time and date to your global page and I am sure that the colleague that's not interested in your message will look at your display more often. Even when it's just to see when he can leave the office.

To not have people to look outside to see if it's raining

When you now know that you can add widgets to the global page, you don't have to design the weather widget for every single page. How convenient is that?

Working with a master/global page is efficient and time-saving. Next to that, it also makes it easier to express your corporate styling throughout your playlist. That makes it more fun to create. And we do like fun, don't we? 

Here's a video tutorial that shows you how to use the global page for creating a template for future use. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and not miss out on new tutorials.