Live Session Layouts

A layout is how the live session screen is arranged — where the player, the video, the comments and the track information sit. They're at Manage → Live Layouts.

Groups that don't set any up use the site's, which work for an ordinary session. This is for when yours aren't ordinary.

Building one

A layout is a grid. You give it a name and lay out the panels you want. Advanced options let you write the grid directly if you'd rather.

From the list you can copy a layout to start a variation, edit it, delete it, or mark one as your group's default.

Export and import move layouts between groups — export one or all of them to a file, and import it somewhere else. Importing replaces a layout of the same name and leaves anything the file doesn't mention alone.

Mappings: which layout a session gets

A layout on its own isn't used until something points at it. Mappings are the conditions that choose one, and a layout can have several.

You can match on:

• Session status — upcoming, live, ended.
• Session category.
• Who's looking — the host, an attendee, a projected screen, or somebody in the room at an in-person session. The two in-person ones are the usual reason to draw a second layout. Hosts and attendees can share one: the host panel only appears for hosts.
• What the meeting is doing — playing a track, or people talking. This is the built-in meeting only; there is nothing to switch between without one.
• Session features, and submission types.

The more conditions a mapping names, the more specific it is, and the best fit wins. You don't have to cover everything: anything your mappings don't catch falls back to your group's default layout, and then to the site's, so a session always has a layout. Draw one for the cases that need it and leave the rest alone.

Trying it

Make a session to experiment on and set its Session List Visibility to Hidden, so it stays out of the list members see. Start it, open the player page, and you can change the layout and reload the page until it looks right. Delete the session when you're done with it.