Home Screen vs Menu: What's the Difference?

Your Home Screen is the List that users see when they open your app. Usually your Home Screen will consist of multiple Lists showing all of the various content areas of your app. As discussed in a previous Help Centre Article, you'll decide what Lists or 'tiles' will make up your app's Home Screen.

When you open your Workspace in the Thrive CMS, you'll land on your app's Home Screen. You'll know that you're editing your app's Home Screen as the Home Screen menu item will be highlighted in blue as shown below:

You will also notice however, that below the Home Screen there is an option called Menu.

While your app's Home Screen is a menu in itself, the Menu option in the CMS relates to the content items that will appear in the app's sidebar / hamburger menu. The hamburger menu is accessed in your app by pressing the 'hamburger' icon at the top-left of the screen, or by swiping from the left edge of the screen.

An illustration of the difference between the app Home Screen and Menu is shown below. In this case, the Home Screen has the 2 Column List layout enabled, with the Display Hero option selected, and the Hero Carousel enabled. You can find out more about these layout and appearance options for your Lists at this Help Centre article.

Some of our customers prefer to simply have the same content items present on their Home Screen and Main Menu. To achieve this, you would create your content items on the Home Screen first of all, then navigate to the Menu in the CMS and use the Existing option to also add those existing content items to the Menu.

Others prefer to use the Menu to host links to other content items that are not present on the app's Home Screen, but which they aim to give users easier access to.

There is no 'correct' approach to what you decide to use your Menu for, but having the same content in the Menu and Home Screen can be a good idea because the Menu is always available to swipe-out from the left edge of the screen, so your users can use it to access various sections of your app without having to navigate back to the Home Screen first.