Actions and Page Layouts

Before an action will show up both in the full Salesforce site and in Salesforce1, you need to add it to a page layout.

Global Page Layouts

What is a global page? The Home page, the User Profile page, and the Chatter home pages are all examples of global pages in the full Salesforce site. The actions that are displayed on these pages are driven by a global publisher layout. It’s like a page layout, but it contains only the Publisher Actions section.

Global publisher layouts let you customize actions that appear on Chatter publishers for global pages such as the Home page and the Chatter page. Global publisher layouts also drive the actions that users see in the action bar and action menu on the Feed and People pages in Salesforce1. Global publisher layouts can be composed only from global actions.

After creating global publisher layouts, you can assign them to different user profiles, which lets you customize which actions the users under different profiles see by default on the global pages.

To create a custom global publisher layout, or to customize the default global layout, in Setup, go to Create | Global Actions | Publisher Layouts. After you’ve defined a global publisher layout, click Publisher Layout Assignment to assign it to user profiles.

Object Page Layouts

Object-specific actions can be added only to page layouts for the object to which they are assigned. However, you can add global actions to the page layout of any object that supports actions.

You can customize the actions that show up on object page layouts—like those for Account, Opportunity, and Contact—by using the page layout editor. Actions that are added to the Publisher Actions section of an object’s page layout show up in the Chatter publisher for that object in the full Salesforce site and in the action bar on the object’s record pages in Salesforce1.

You can manage actions for object pages from Setup, under Customize | Object | Page Layouts.

If you haven’t customized the actions on a page layout, the actions that are displayed on pages for that object default to the actions that are present on the global publisher layout. If a page layout is using the global publisher layout settings, you can override them.
  • To override the global layout settings on a page layout, click override the global layout from the text in the Publisher Actions section, or click override global publisher layout. Upon overriding, the publisher actions default to the standard actions—Post, File, Link, Poll, and Thanks—regardless of what actions were assigned to the global publisher layout.
  • To revert the actions to those on the global publisher layout, hover over the Publisher Actions section and click revert to global publisher layout.