Customizing Pages and Views
Goal of this article: Inform project managers / team leads on how to customize pages to view important data so that all teams have the information they need.
Why Should You Create a Custom Page or View?
ShotGrid offers many default pages for things like Projects, Assets and Tasks. But very often it is useful to create a new Page or View. There are 2 main reasons why you would want to do this:
1. Make information easier to find/access.
As your creative projects continue to evolve the amount of data forever increases. ShotGrid is wonderful at helping you organize large amounts of this data. By using custom Pages or Views, you can make it easy for everyone to find what they need.
Leverage Existing Views
Adding new views to the Assets page is one example that allows a quick view on assets by asset type. This could be done using View or using Page Filters but In this case we have chosen to organize by Views. You can see this in the Automotive Demo project that comes with ShotGrid. Another example of this would be adding new views on a Task page, each View filtering to a different Pipeline Step.
Creating Specific Use Pages - For Teams
Another common use is providing each team a home page / dashboard of all the important information to them. For a Modelling team this could highlight the latest designs coming their way, show an overview of the work left to do, or summarize how many days left to the next milestone.
Creating Specific Use Pages - For Individuals
Executive stakeholders may have a simpler dashboard in ShotGrid that only shows them designs that are waiting for their approval. They could use ShotGrid to provide feedback, or wait until a formal review session to address the designs.
Personal Pages
ShotGrid is all about collaborating as a team but you can also make personal pages. This can help organize your needs to focus on your Tasks, your Notes or the latest Versions you've created. If you are looking after multiple projects but one is severely behind schedule or encountering major blocking issues, you can highlight this information in your own personal page.
When you create a new Global Page, by default it is set to private. If you create a Project specific page, it will automatically be shared with the project.
2. Hiding Sensitive Information
As we just mentioned, ShotGrid is in the spirit of collaboration and working on your projects as a team. But sometimes there is sensitive information that you don't want all users to see. For example, maybe you keep track of Tasks that are often delayed or miss their deadlines. You can control the permissions so that only the people that are supposed to see it, can.
How to Create a Custom View
Adding custom Views allows you to unlock so many viewing options. These can be created by using the Design Page option in the top right corner of each page, and creating a New View. You can rename these views and select the type of information you want to display. This can be created on all pages that have the "Design Page" option.
By default, some permission roles won't be able to do this.
How to Create a Custom Page
Adding Custom pages are a great high level way to create new views of all the data in ShotGrid. Creating new custom pages are as easy as choosing New Page and selecting the type of page you would like to create.
If a project appears in the dialog or you select a project, your age will be bound to that one project. If you remove the project field, your page will be global to ShotGrid.
You will have the option to have a page based on an Entity. For example if you pick Notes, all the information on this page will only look at the Notes data in ShotGrid. In this example lets show a Canvas page which allow you use multiple data types on one page. You can use widgets & pre-configured widgets to show all of your data.
