About templating versions for help center themes

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Guide templating renders the help center theme packages. This contains the Curlybars templating language that is used in the template files, CSS and JS files, and the manifest file.

Guide templating is also known as the Templating API.

To learn more about help center themes, see Customizing your help center theme and the Templating API documentation.

This article covers the following topics:

• About Guide templating versions
• Checking your templating version
• Upgrading your templating version

About Guide templating versions

The following table lists the Guide templating versions, release dates, and links to the related developer documentation page where you can find specific information about what is available in each version.

To check which version you're using, see Checking your templating version.

Table 1.

Version	Release date	Developer documentation page
1	November 20, 2014	N/A
2	February 24, 2020	Upgrading from templating API v1
3	June 1, 2023	Upgrading from templating API v2
4	July 2, 2024	Upgrading from templating API v3

Checking your templating version

You can see the templating version when you edit the theme or when you view the manifest file.

To check the templating version

1. In Knowledge admin, click Customize design () in the sidebar.
2. Click Customize on the theme you want to see.
3. Click Edit code.
4. Under the theme name, you'll see the templating version number, for example, Templating API v2.

   

   This version number corresponds to the api_version field in the manifest file.

Upgrading your templating version

If you have customized your help center theme, you can upgrade to the latest templating version to take advantage of new features, improved performance, and accessibility improvements.

When you migrate from a theming experience, some new restrictions will be applied to your themes. During the migration process, we suspend some file type and file size limitations to allow you to move your theme and assets to the new theming experience where they will be easier to work with.

For example, if you have a number of PDFs or other files that are no longer supported in theme assets, you will be able to migrate your theme. From there you can export that theme to retrieve all of these files easily. However, you won’t be able to duplicate or re-import that theme until the unsupported files are removed from the theme.

To upgrade the templating version

1. Download your help center theme, see Downloading a help center theme.
2. Open the theme package locally and edit the manifest.json file.
3. In the manifest.json file, find the api_version field and change the value to the version you want to upgrade to.
4. Preview your theme changes locally. When you preview the theme, you'll get warnings if you are using helpers that have been deprecated in the version you are upgrading to.
5. If you are using a deprecated helper, refer to the related developer documentation (see About Guide templating versions ) to replace the helper with a supported equivalent.

   Preview your theme again to verify that there are no further warnings.

6. Upload the updated theme to Guide (see Importing your help center theme).

   You can check that the new version has been applied by checking your templating version.