Enabling profiles in your Help Center (Guide Professional)

Help Center profiles display user information, activity, and recent contributions. Help Center profiles also enable users to follow one another and get notifications of new articles, posts, and comments for anyone they are following. Help Center profiles are available even if you are not using Community in your Help Center.

Help Center profiles are available on Guide Professional.

This article contains the following sections:

• About Help Center profiles
• Enabling and disabling Help Center profiles
• Adding profiles to your custom Help Center theme

About Help Center profiles

Help Center profiles contain the following user information:  

• Name and optional personal bio

• Member since date - date of the first public contribution

• Last activity - date of the last contribution

• Total activity - count of all the user's actions

• Votes - number of votes the user has given

• Subscriptions - number of subscriptions the user has

• Following and Followed by - number of users the user is following and being followed by

Profiles also include an overview of the user's last ten contributions, as well as access to all the user's articles, posts, and comments.

Help Center profiles can be either public, so that they are visible to everyone, or private, so that they are only visible to the owner and agents. Public profiles become active and visible to all users when the user makes a public contribution, such as a post, community comment, or article comment. Until then, the profile is visible only to the owner and agents.

Enabling and disabling Help Center profiles

If you are using a standard Help Center theme, Help Center profiles are enabled by default. You can enable or disable profiles as needed in Help Center settings.

If you are using a custom Help Center theme you might need to add code to your custom theme before you can enable Help Center profiles (see Adding profiles to your custom Help Center theme).

You can determine whether you want your Help Center profiles to be public, for everyone to see, or private, for only the owner and agents to see. Users cannot follow one another with private profiles.

Note: If you are using SSO or the User API and have disabled the “Allow users to view and edit their profile data” setting in Zendesk Support, users will not be able to edit anything other than the description in their Help Center profile.

To enable or disable Help Center profiles

1. In Guide, click the Settings () icon in the sidebar.
2. Under Communities, select or deselect User profiles.
3. If you are enabling Help Center profiles, decide whether you want Public user profiles, which are visible to everyone, or Private user profiles, which are visible to only the user it belongs to and agents.
4. Click Update.

Adding profiles to your custom Help Center theme

If you are using a custom Help Center theme created before June 20th, 2016, some extra steps are required to add Help Center profiles to your Help Center.

As described below, you need to style your user profile template and you need to update the code anywhere you want the author's name and avatar to link to their Help Center profile, including on articles, article comments, community posts, community comments, and the search results page.

To add Help Center profiles to a custom theme

1. In Guide, click the Customize design () icon in the sidebar.
2. Click Edit theme.
3. Open the User profile page template and add styling with CSS, then Save.

   This template is inactive until you complete these steps and enable Help Center profiles.

   Tip: Attached to the bottom of this article are two CSS styling examples you can use, if you want.

   

4. Open the Article page template in your Help Center theme, then replace three code blocks to update the article author, comment author, and avatar to open Help Center profiles.

   You can skip this step if you don't want the article author, comment author, and avatar on all article pages to link to Help Center profiles.

   Note: If you need the steps for opening the Theme Editor to edit a page template, see Customizing the HTML.
5. Open the Community post page template in your Help Center theme, then replace three code blocks to update the community post author, comment author, and avatar to open Help Center profiles.

   You can skip this step if you don't want the community post author, comment author, and avatar on all community post pages to link to Help Center profiles.

6. Open the Search results page template in your Help Center theme, then replace two code blocks to update the article author names and community post author names in search results to open Help Center profiles.

   You can skip this step if you don't want the author names for articles and community posts in search results to link to Help Center profiles.

   Note: If you have an older theme, your search results template might use the {{meta}} helper. In that case you need to use this code instead to replace the two code blocks in your search results template.
7. Test your styling and author links in preview mode, then click Publish changes to update your theme.
8. In Guide, click the Settings () icon in the sidebar, then select User profiles and click Update.

   Help Center profiles are live in your Help Center.