💡 New to portals?
Start with our A-to-Z guide on creating portals and managing users' access.
Once your portal is ready, the next step is inviting your users in!
Whether you're building a public membership portal, or an internal portal for your employees or clients, you can publish your portal and share its public URL with your audience.
Users can then access the portal and log in or sign up according to the access settings you've configured.
You can also place your portal under your own branded domain for a more professional and seamless experience.
How to publish your portal and copy its public URL
To make your portal accessible to users:
Open your portal project
Open the Share menu in the top-right corner
Go to the Publish tab
Click Publish if your portal is not already published
➔ Once published, your portal becomes accessible through its Public address URL.
Simply copy the URL and share it with your audience. Users can then access the portal and:
Log in to existing accounts
Sign up for new accounts (if sign-up is enabled)
Access the portal pages according to the permissions you've configured
ℹ️ Inside the same Publish tab, you can control whether your portal's sidebar menu should be expanded or collapsed by default:
You can return to this tab at any time to Unpublish your portal if needed.
💡 Create a public landing page in your portal:
If all pages in your portal are restricted to logged-in users, consider creating a dedicated Home or Welcome page that remains publicly accessible.
This gives visitors somewhere to land before signing up or logging in. You can use this page to introduce the portal, explain what it's for, outline the available features, and provide clear instructions on how users can access their accounts:
A simple welcome page can make the onboarding experience much smoother and help users find their way around before they log in.
How to set up a branded URL for your portal
If you'd like users to access the portal through your own branded domain instead of a Formaloo URL, you can configure a custom domain for it. For example:
Instead of:
workspacename.formaloo.app/app/portal-slugYou could use:
portal.yourcompany.com/app/portal-slugOr just
portal.yourcompany.com
ℹ️ Check our detailed guide on setting up a custom domain for your app or portal.
Add a CNAME record for your subdomain, and wait for the DNS changes to fully propagate – then, configure your custom URL in your Formaloo projects, following one of the below options.
Option 1: Use a workspace-wide project custom domain for all your portals
If you'd like all apps and portals in the workspace to use the same branded subdomain:
Click your profile icon and go to Workspace settings,
Configure the Projects custom domain:
➔ Once configured, the custom domain will automatically be pulled into all your apps' and portals' public address URLs.
Each app/portal will remain accessible under its own unique path. For example:
your.subdomain.com/app/abc123
Option 2: Assign your custom subdomain to a specific portal
If you'd like a particular portal to open directly under your branded URL:
Don't add your subdomain under Workspace settings > Projects custom domain,
Instead, go directly to your portal's Share → Publish tab
Enter your custom subdomain URL in the Customize link field
In this setup, visitors can access the portal directly through that branded subdomain URL.
Can I embed my portal on a page of my website?
Portals and apps that presuppose external user authentication should not be embedded.
If you're building a customer-facing portal and want a seamless branded experience, we strongly recommend using a custom domain instead of embedding.
⚠️ While regular apps and dashboards built in Formaloo can be embedded on external websites using an iframe – portals' authentication flows such as login or signup, are not supported inside iframes.
As a result, portal users may be unable to sign up or log in correctly when the portal is embedded.
💡 To place your portal under your branded URL instead, refer to the previous steps in this guide, and check out our detailed guide on setting up a custom domain for your app or portal.
Bottom line
To invite people into your portal, simply publish it and share its public URL with your audience.
For the best user experience, especially when login and signup are involved, consider placing the portal under your own branded domain rather than embedding it on a website. This gives users a seamless and reliable way to access your portal while keeping the experience fully on-brand 🧡