New: Choose Your Portal's Landing Page

Until now, every portal opened on the same page: the logged-in user's profile. That works when the portal is mostly about a person's own record, but it is the wrong first screen for a portal with several tables to work through. This release lets you choose what opens first.

A Navigation Home Page

New portals now open on a navigation page: a grid of cards, one for each page the user can reach. Each card shows the page name, an icon for its view type, and a short description, with the portal name and an optional tagline at the top.

The cards follow the same permissions as the sidebar, so a user only sees cards for the tables they can actually open. The icon matches the view type, so a table reads as a table, a gallery as a grid, a kanban as a board, and a calendar as a calendar. It is a launcher: the user lands, sees everything they can do, and picks where to go.

You do not build this page. It is assembled from the pages the user already has access to, so it stays correct as you add tables or change permissions.

Choosing What Opens First

Open a portal's settings, go to the Design tab, and use the new Landing page dropdown. There are three choices:

• Navigation shows the card launcher above. This is the default for new portals.
• Profile opens straight to the user's own record, the way portals worked before.
• A specific table opens straight to one table, in whatever view type it uses, for portals built around a single list.

Each option in the dropdown carries an icon for the page type, so you can see at a glance what you are picking.

There is also a new Description field in the Design tab. Set it and the text shows as the subtitle under the portal name on the navigation page. Use it for a one-line explanation of what the portal is for.

The full reference is in Landing Page.

Existing Portals Are Unchanged

Portals you created before this release stay on the Profile page, so nothing changes for the links you already share. When you want the navigation page, switch it in the Design tab. New portals start on Navigation out of the box.

Who This Helps Most

The navigation page earns its place when a portal has more than one thing to do.

• Project management portals and inventory management portals, where users move between tasks, projects, stock, and reports rather than a single record.
• CRM portals and client portals, where a client opens the portal to see several areas of their account at once.
• Membership portals, where members reach events, resources, and their own details from one place.

If your portal is really about one record per user, Profile is still the right landing page, and it is one click away in the dropdown.

How It Compares

Most Airtable portal tools handle the home screen at opposite extremes. Airtable's own Interface Designer and full app builders like Softr, Noloco, and Stacker give you a page builder: you lay out navigation by hand, which is flexible but is one more thing to design and keep in sync as the portal grows.

CollabPortals takes the middle path. The navigation page is built for you from the pages each user can access, so it is right by default and stays right, and you still get a simple setting to open on the profile or a single table instead. You get a sensible home screen without building one, at $10 per month flat.

Try It

It is live now on every plan. Create a new portal to see the navigation page, or open an existing one, go to the Design tab, and switch its landing page. If there is something more you want from it, the public roadmap is the place to ask.