Experiences & cards

The hierarchy, exactly

experience → card(s) → template

• An experience is a set of at least one card — the participant-facing flow shown by the hosted runtime (Outpost) or on your site.
• A card is a single page. It applies a template, whose one slot — the outlet — holds the card’s content. A card may also carry form inputs, document uploads, confirmations or redirects.
• A template (card layout template) is the chrome a card renders into: it exposes named regions — always an outlet, plus optional header / logo / footer driven by your branding.

The outlet’s content is currently being reworked and will be reintroduced later. A card can have no template and an empty outlet, so the platform controls exactly what each card displays.

Designed vs deployed

“Card” spans two stages:

• Designed — the card as you build it inside an experience in the portal.
• Deployed — when you deploy an experience to an account, each card is denormalised into a flat, self-contained record carrying your branding and template, plus a global short id that is its shortcode.

At request time, runtime is a single lookup keyed by the shortcode — there is no experience → card traversal. Deploying the same experience to two accounts yields two deployed cards with distinct shortcodes and branding; re-deploying overwrites in place.

Two delivery surfaces, one shortcode

Surface	Traffic pattern	How it resolves
Outpost (hosted)	Occasional — someone opens a link	Looks the shortcode up directly.
Onflow (on your site)	Constant — every page view	Matches the page against a manifest, which yields a card shortcode, then loads that card — no per-page database hit.

Templates

The shared catalogue of templates includes standard, widget (“Standard widget”), widget-bar (“Popout bar”), centered, blank and split-hero. Each renders the card’s content into its outlet and applies your branding to the surrounding chrome.

Related

• Build one: your first experience.
• The editor: experience editor.
• Decide when it shows: flows.