Introducing the Flex Editor

Flex is the editor behind every modern page in Poet. If you are building new content, this is where you build it.

Finding a Flex page

In the course tree (inside a coourse) on the left, turn on Expand all. Each page then shows its type beneath its name — Flex Slide, Question Data, Floating Grid, and so on. That is the quickest way to see which of your pages are Flex.

Open a Flex page and two chips appear beside the page name: Type: Flex and Location, showing where the page sits in the course. On the Content tab you will see Open in Flex Editor.

If a page shows Upgrade to Flex instead, it is in an older format. See Upgrading legacy slides to Flex.

Adding a new Flex page

Select + Add Page at the foot of the course tree or using the '+' above or below an existing slide,

Using Add Page at the bottom of the course tree then choose Slide. You will be asked what sort of page you want; Flex types are marked.

The three parts of the editor

Select Open in Flex Editor and the editor takes over the screen.

The canvas, on the left

Your page as the learner will see it — laid out and styled, not a list of fields.

Select anything in the outline and it is highlighted here with a small label showing its type. Selecting an element on the canvas does the same.

Text is editable in place. Double-click a piece of text and type straight into it.

The outline, on the right

The structure of the page as a tree. This is the part worth understanding.

A Flex page is built from Sections and Blocks:

Sections are containers. They hold blocks, and they can hold other sections — a Header section might contain a Text Section.

Blocks are the content — an image, a video, text, a button, an interaction.

You can easily rearrange your content by dragging and dropping within the right-hand sidebar. For example, you can move a block within a section, move a block to a different section, or reorder your sections:

Sections and blocks carry different coloured icons, so you can tell them apart at a glance. Sections collapse and expand with the chevron beside them.

A page might look like this:

There are two Add controls and the difference matters. + Add New at the foot of a section adds a block inside that section. + Add New Section at the very bottom adds a new section to the page. If a block lands somewhere you did not expect, this is almost always why.

The toolbar, along the top

Insert Template — start from a ready-made layout instead of an empty section
Edit / Preview — switch between building the page and seeing it behave as a learner would
Save and Exit

Use Preview often. The canvas shows you the layout; Preview shows you the behaviour.

The eye icon also shows the viewpoint menu that shows what a slide would look like in desktop, tablet or mobile view and with a ruler setting, spacing guides around sections and spacing in elements