The community consists of posts associated with different discussion topics. Topics can be anything you want, and you can create as many as you want.
Guide managers can add, edit, delete, and manually arrange topics. Agents and moderators don't have the permissions to make these changes.
For information about managing community posts within discussion topics, see Managing community posts.
Adding discussion topics
Discussion topics can be anything you want. You can add as many topics as you need.
For example, if you support multiple products, you might add a topic for each product. If you have one product with a lot of functionality, you might add a topic for each major feature area or task. If you have different types of users -- end-users and API developers, for example -- you might add a topic for each type of user. You can also add a General Discussion topic where users can discuss issues that don't quite fit in the other topics.
To add a topic
- Click Add in the top menu bar, then select Community topic.
- Enter a Name and optional Description for your section.
- Select a User segment to determine who can access this topic.
By default, a topic is visible to all users. You can choose to restrict access to signed-in users.
On Guide Professional and Enterprise, you have the ability to restrict access based on tags, organizations, or groups by applying custom user segments (see Creating user segments to restrict access). On Guide Professional and Enterprise, you can also restrict access to agents and managers to create internal-only access.
- Under Who can manage posts, select Managers if you want only Guide Managers to add and edit posts, or leave Agents and managers selected if you want agents to also be able to add and edit posts in this section.
- Click Add.
Editing and deleting discussion topics
You can edit a discussion topic if you need to change the name, description, or access privileges.
You can delete a topic if you no longer need it. When you delete a topic, all the posts in the topic are also deleted. If you don't want to delete the posts in the topic, move the posts before you delete the topic.
To edit a topic
- Open the topic in Help Center, then click Edit topic in the top menu bar.
- Make your changes to the name or description and click Update.
To delete a topic
- Open the topic in Help Center, then click Edit topic in the top menu bar.
Be sure you've moved any posts that you want to save to another topic.
- Click the Delete topic link on the page.
Reordering discussion topics
You can manually reorder your community discussion topics. You cannot reorder the posts within a topic.
To manually reorder topics
- In Guide, click the Arrange content (
) icon in the sidebar, then click Arrange topics.
- Click any community topic, then drag it to another place in the order.
- Click Save when you're finished.
52 Comments
Hey Justin,
Zendesk Guide/Community templates can have custom HTML, CSS and JS applied to them, though you may want to consider retaining a web developer or designer with experience in these fields for best results. What you've described sounds very possible.
If you aren't a Zendesk user yet, you can sign up for a trial and get access to the Guide feature and try it out. Here's a link to a page of resources that Zendesk provides.
Justin -
Are you trying to use HTML to customize your community or just in a community post?
@Nicole - Ideally we would have an HTML option within the editing options of a post itself.
Hey Justin,
As Dan mentioned the Guide/Community templates can have code applied to them. Additionally, you can add HTML to an article from within the source code tab as shown in the screenshot below:
At this time HTML content cannot be applied directly within the community post editor so your best option will be to apply your code to your Guide theme.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Hi Team,
this was asked before, but I still couldn't find any guidelines as to how we can localize Community Topics. When I add/edit a topic, there simply aren't any language settings.
We want topics to be displayed in respective languages depending on the user's locale (the languages we activated in our account settings).
Is that possible at all?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Pavel,
We use user segments to manage this. We created a user segment for each language and applied the user segment to the appropriate forum. We then tag the organizations with the language so then they only see the forum for their language.
Thanks,
Maggie
Hi Maggie,
thanks for your reply!
Do I get it right that it won't work for unregistered users who want to browse through the topics without signing in?
Ah, yes, you are correct Pavel - they do have to sign in for the user segments to work. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you can connect Community Topics to languages for non-signed in users to browse:(
We would like to localize topic names as well. Maggie's solution won't work; that actually creates two (or more) forum topics that are actually the same topic, not to mention the hassle of extra user segments. A question asked in english won't show up in the french version of the topic. We would rather have all posts in one topic, whose title is localized. It's OK if the post itself isn't localized, and we may have an english post alongside a french post in the same topic, we feel that's better than segregating content from each other.
What would be ideal is a way of localizing topics similar to how we can localize categories and sections.
Hello !
Is there any improvement related to the localisation of the community topics ?
Its very weird to mix every language at the same place for our users...
Hello @Antonin,
At this time, we have no announcement on a product update for localization. I would recommend posting your product requests in our product feedback forums so our developers can consider them for future updates.
Best regards.
I created a Gather Community including all of the topics and while I can add Community Topics and Posts, I have lost my ability to edit existing topics. I still am an Admin in ZenDesk and retain all my other capabilities. What happened?
Hi Linda,
Hmm, that's really odd. When you click into a topic, what does it looks like? Do you have the Add options in the upper left like usual and just no Edit topic button? Can you take a screen print on the screen you expect to see the Edit topic option so I can better see what might be happening?
Thanks,
Maggie
Actually I have the same issue as Linda above - cannot edit community topics while being signed in as admin.
Here is how the page lookis like - there is no edit button on top. Please help to solve
2) Same issue as people above - looking to localize community topics into different languages.
Hey Dreadkn1ght123,
In your attached screenshot, it looks like you're viewing the actual post and not the topic that contains all the posts. Can you try navigating to the topic and see if the Edit Topic button shows up there? You can navigate to that topic from the post you're viewing by clicking the hyperlink as shown in my screenshot below:
Let me know if you still are unable to locate the Edit Topic option.
Cheers!
Hey Brett, yeap - found the edit button. Thanks for that.
But there is still no way how to localize community topics, correct?
Dynamic content doesn't seem to work on the community topics.
Hey Dreadkn1ght123,
Glad you were able to find the button!
As it turns out, there's no localization feature within Gather at this time. You'd need to create a separate topic for each language you support similar to how we have our set up here: Topics - Zendesk help
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Can anyone give me a quick hint as to which template file I need to edit in order to add an image to the TOPIC page? For each TOPIC I'd like a different picture which would show up on the main TOPIC page. Also, a completely different (smaller) picture on the COMMUNITY page in each topic box.
Something like this
Any hints welcome!
Hello uncle_joe
Great question! This is definitely possible, and actually a lot of people have done this to customize the look and feel of their help center. I was able to find a couple community posts sharing some custom code and walk throughs of how to add those images:
This article also has a lot of information on adding your own assets to the theme for cusotmization:
I hope those all help!
Thanks. I managed to get the images up there and they look good.
Is it possible to add images to the thread list as well on the topic index page? If someone has an image in their post, I'd like a thumbnail to appear next to the title/link on the index page.
Hello uncle_joe
I'm glad to hear it!
In terms of getting images as thumbnails, that is going to be a lot trickier. Because you aren't uploading the assets ahead of time but instead pulling them dynamically from the post as your community members add them. I checked in with a colleague who is better versed in this, and they confirmed that it is possible! That being said it would likely require you to create a custom_script.js file and then have that referenced in the community_post_list_page.hbs page.
I'm not sure of the details of this so hopefully you've got some development skills or resources on hand! If you're looking to see if others might have some recommendations a great place to check is our developer community.
I hope that helps!
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