--- title: "2-7. Overview of the Collection Layout" url: "https://support.sardius.media/knowledge-base/2-7-overview-of-the-collection-layout" category: "Intermediate Features (Level 2)" updated: 2026-08-20 summary: "In this video, we will present an overview of the Collection layout for a Sardius Channel. This layout is ideal for curating a video-on-demand service for your audience. You will learn how to create a feed, optimize your assets library, and organize your content through customizing your channel." --- # 2-7. Overview of the Collection Layout **Video** > **Transcript:** Welcome fellow Sardius users. Today we're going to take a look at the Collection layout, which can help you create a robust VOD library. Viewers will see and interact with your Collection site, much like they would with popular VOD platforms. Upon entering, they can see featured content, nav bar links, a search function, and a personalized account page. If the viewer scrolls down the page, they'll see video sliders, which can be powered by various metadata settings. Once they select the video, we'll get a preview page where they can see the title of the video description and any downloadable content. Pressing watch will start playback. You can continue to navigate around the site while the video plays. The video will shrink into a mini player, and you can move the player around as you browse. When you click on a series and go to the subpage, you can see an image up top, and can even manipulate the content that's presented to you. The more content you have, and the more it's appropriately tagged and organized with your metadata, the more powerful and more robust this collection layout will be. Now that we know what we can build, let's start with setting it up. Before we can actually configure a channel, we need to lay the foundation by tagging assets with appropriate metadata such as categories and series. These categories in series need to be created first. Be sure to add images to your category in series so they render appropriately on the front end. Our first step to creating our channel will be to first create a feed. Let's access our feeds library and create a VOD feed. The title and description we give it here will just be for internal purposes. Now we need to program the feed to pull in certain content. Click on assets, then create a smart playlist according to your specifications. There are two different ways you can do this. One way is to tell the playlist to search for specific categories, series, tags, topics for any combination of those. The other way you can do this is to utilize a single tag. You would have to make sure all of your content is using this tag in order for the feed to pull it in. So what method works best for you? Using a combination of categories and series is ideal for complete metadata control. Often this works best for larger libraries, where you can add or remove large sections of assets by simple edits of the feed. Using a single tag is ideal for those who don't want to invest a lot of time managing metadata, but it does become more difficult to manage large sections of content as you grow. Either way, the collection layout will access the feed, parse the metadata of the content in the feed, and collate the content when the layout is rendered for your viewer. For this video, I will utilize the first option and use the combination of categories for my feed. Once I have these added, I'll click update and see my selections here. Let's go tag some content. We'll start by accessing our assets library, and we will make sure to have some content tagged with categories, series and speakers so we can see our channel populated as we work in test. Since our feed is referencing certain categories, we'll also make sure the content we want contains at least one of those categories. If any of my categories are not present on an asset, then our channel won't be able to present those assets to the viewer. Our feed is ready and now it contains content. So let's go build our channel. Let's return to our channel library and create a channel as an online library. Once we've entered our settings, we can select the collection layout from our options. If you don't see this layout in your list, please reach out to Sardius Support and we can enable it for you. Our channel is ready, so let's go customize. Under Layout Features, we'll start with common settings. Click on this section and locate the master Feed ID at the top. Click on the dropdown and select our VOD feed. Before we do anything else, we're going to select update at the bottom of the Experience Options column. This will apply the feed to the channel and let us freely move around the editor without losing any work. Let's highlight a few areas you'll need to visit in order to set your channel up for success. Under Common settings, you'll establish your fonts set vernacular, upload a few key images, and more. Under Common colors, you'll apply your brand or design colors to the layouts, background buttons, accents, and text. The header section is where you will upload your logo and establish your header links. Be aware that when you add pages to your layout, they will not be automatically added to your header. Keep track of the pages you create or enable, then come back here to finalize your menu. For the home page, we can add and edit our hero slider and different sections throughout the page, including asset sliders for individual videos in the category, multi-asset sliders to show off categories or series, a resume watching slider, and other areas. You can enable stock pages such as search speakers and a live page, or you can create custom pages of your own to showcase selected categories or series. If your channel has an authentication or registration layer, you can enable a my account page for the user to have access to a watch list or TV anywhere features. The footer can provide easy access to social media platforms and any legal or contact links. The player menu controls the actual playback experience for every video on your site, including download permissions. Finally, the single asset view allows you to customize what the viewer sees when they click into an individual video. As you make your edits, you will see changes in the preview window. None of these changes are applied publicly until you click Update Channel at the bottom. Before you can make your changes. Be sure to revisit the header section and update your menu with any routes for pages you have created. Congratulations! You are now ready to set up a Collection layout of your own. If you have any more questions, reach out to your Sardius account manager. We'll see you in the next video. In this video, we will present an overview of the Collection layout for a Sardius Channel. This layout is ideal for curating a video-on-demand service for your audience. You will learn how to create a feed, optimize your assets library, and organize your content through customizing your channel. > **Note:** _**Note:**_ A complete guide to the Collection layout is available [**HERE**](https://support.sardius.media/knowledge-base/customizing-the-collection-20-layout-overview). **Onboarding Video Series (Level 2)**   - **Next Video:** [Manage Your Chatroom](https://support.sardius.media/knowledge-base/8-manage-your-chatroom) - _Previous Video:_ [Overview of the Slate Layout](https://support.sardius.media/knowledge-base/2-5-overview-of-the-slate-layout)