The home screen is the first thing people see when they open your app — worth a little thought, but not much more than that. Here, you’ll use the App Setup Wizard to pick one of three pre-built layouts and see what each is designed to show off. By the end, you’ll have a layout chosen and saved, and every later step of the wizard — navigation, branding, the live preview — will pick it up automatically.
This step moves fast on purpose. Nothing here is permanent — think of the layout as a starting point you’re free to refine later in the App Settings Manager.
What you’ll have at the end
- A home screen layout chosen and saved for your app.
- A clear sense of which layout fits the kind of content you publish (general listings, a visual showcase, or events and venues).
- The wizard’s later steps pre-loaded with a preview image of your chosen layout.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure:
- You are signed in to WordPress as an administrator (the wizard requires the
manage_optionscapability). - GeoDirectory is installed and active. The full wizard — including the Home Screen step — only appears once a supported core plugin is detected. Without it, the wizard stops at the Welcome step.
- You have completed the Welcome step of the App Setup Wizard. The Welcome step prompts you to install the MAM GeoDirectory plugin if it isn’t already present, and the Next Step button stays disabled until that integration is in place.
You don’t need any listings yet to choose a layout. Pick one and preview your app even with an empty directory — your content will fill in the layout as you add it.
The three layouts
The Home Screen step gives you three pre-built layouts to choose from — each one arranges the same underlying GeoDirectory content a different way:
| Layout | Name | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Layout 1 | Classic Directory | A straightforward, list-first directory. A good default when you want familiar, scannable listings. |
| Layout 2 | Modern Carousel | A more visual, carousel-led home screen for showcasing featured listings and imagery. |
| Layout 3 | Events and Venues | Apps centered on events and the places that host them. |
All three draw on your GeoDirectory data, and all three can be customized once the wizard is done. Picking one here doesn’t shut the door on the others — it just sets your starting structure.
Steps
1. Open the Home Screen step
From the Welcome step, click Next Step: Set Up Your Home Screen →, and the wizard moves you into the Home Screen step, titled Customize Your App Home Screen.
Stepped away and come back? Pick up right where you left off — from the setup reminder notice in the admin, or by reopening the App Setup Wizard from the MAM (Mobile App Manager) menu.
2. Review what the home screen is for
Take a second to read the short intro at the top of the step — it lays out what the home screen is for: showcasing featured listings, surfacing nearby businesses, and highlighting categories, all pulled from your GeoDirectory data. It’s context for the choice ahead, not a form; there’s nothing to fill in here.
3. Choose a layout from the grid
Below the intro, you’ll find a grid of three layout cards, each with a preview image and a caption:
- Layout 1: Classic Directory
- Layout 2: Modern Carousel
- Layout 3: Events and Venues
Click whichever card best matches your app. It lights up as selected, and whatever was picked before is cleared. Your choice saves itself immediately in the background — there’s no separate Save button to hunt for.
Come back to this step later and you’ll find your choice still highlighted, so you always know where things stand.
4. Continue to navigation
Once your layout is highlighted, click Next Step: Configure App Navigation → to move on and set up your app’s bottom navigation bar.
From here on, the wizard remembers your choice: on the App Navigation and Colors and Branding steps, the app preview on the right shows your layout, so what you picked here carries through the rest of setup.
How your choice is stored
Your selection is saved as the app’s home layout setting and gets applied when the wizard finalizes your configuration later on. There’s no extra step to “commit” it — clicking the card is all it takes, and picking a new one simply replaces the old choice. Skip this step entirely, and your app defaults to Layout 1: Classic Directory.
What’s next
- Set up navigation — choose which tabs appear in the app’s bottom bar, rename them, and drag to reorder. The Home tab is always present; Deals and Events tabs require their supporting plugins (MAM Special Offers and GeoDirectory Events).
- Refine the home screen — once the wizard is done, open MAM → App Settings Manager to customize the layout further. This is where you enable features like GeoFilters, tag clouds, filter bars, and date selectors on top of the layout you picked.
- Preview on your device — later in the wizard, use the App Previewer step to scan a QR code and load your app live on a phone or tablet, so you can see your chosen layout with your real content.
