Curator 101: Explorer

Nathan Ojeda
Curator Engineer
July 28, 2022

After you have added a lot of content to your site, it can be difficult to find the best way to show it all off. This is the exact scenario we created the Explorer element for! With the Explorer element, you are able to display a reactive grid of content tiles that you can search against or filter on.

When Should I Use the Explorer Layout?

It’s important to know what layout works best for the amount of content you have and what you’re trying to convey. In this instance, the Explorer layout is meant to be used when you have a moderate to large amount of content. A moderate amount of content would around 15 items.

How Do I Get the Most Out of the Explorer Layout?

The default Explorer layout will pull in all the content on your site that is not hidden or restricted by permissions. This includes dashboards, files, pages and external URLs. This can be a lot of content, which is why it is designed to display smaller tiles than we usually show.

It also uses Curator’s Keyword functionality. Therefore, we suggest you associate some of your content with keywords before using this layout.

OK, I Did That, but How Do I Set It Up?

You can set up the Explorer layout in the Page Builder. To get to the Page Builder on the backend go to Content >Pages. Once there, select an existing page to edit or click Create New Page. Now add a new content block to the page. Then click the Edit Content (Pencil) icon to make the Add Element popup display.

When you select the Explorer element, the default version will be added to the page preview.

How Does the Default Explorer Layout Work?

The default version of the Explorer layout will automatically pull in all the content on your side. We will check things like permissions and hidden flags on the backend, so you can be sure we won’t show content that someone isn’t supposed to see. The results will display in the center of a grid.

We also pull in all the keywords on your site that is tied to content as well. We list these out in a section called Filter by Tags. These keywords can be clicked on to filter the center grid results. It will filter all results to only show the tiles associated with the keyword. Unselect the keyword to reset the grid results.

Categories is another section that is very similar to Filter by Tags. The main difference is it is linked to the navigation instead of keywords. It will list out navigation items who have a dashboard somewhere lower in the navigation.

Lastly, we have the search bar above the grid of results. This search bar will search through the results on the page. It can search by keywords, description and title of the content.

This covers the default settings of the Explorer layout. In my next blog on the Explorer layout, I will cover the more advanced configurations you can use to customize it to your needs.