If you are using the standard Copenhagen theme, you can easily add and remove some common search functionality and visibility elements in your theme. These options are advanced settings in the Settings panel of your theme.
You will not see the advanced settings described in this article in your Settings panel if you're using a custom theme created before August 1, 2018.
The settings panel also contains options for setting branding and design elements for your theme, including colors, fonts, logos, and images. For information about those settings, see Branding your help center.
The settings panel sets the values of placeholders in the template code. For example, the
instant search option in the Settings panel sets the value of a placeholder named
settings.instant_search
in the code. If you replace the placeholder in the
code with a literal value such as true
or with another placeholder, you'll no
longer be able to use the Settings panel to set the value in the code.
Setting search options in your standard theme
In the Copenhagen standard theme, you can easily add and remove some common search functionality options for your theme in the settings panel.
To update search options for your theme
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
- Click Customize on the theme you want to update.
- In the Settings panel, click Search settings.
- Select or deselect any of the following options:
- Instant search enables users to see links to suggested articles while entering their search terms, then select matched articles directly from the Search box without going to the search results page first. Instant search uses partial word search and returns results based on article titles only.
- Scoped search in Knowledge base enables users to search only the articles in the current category.
- Scoped search in Community enables users to search only the posts in the current topic.
The theme preview updates so that you can see changes as you add or remove elements.
- When you're finished, click Save at the top.
The changes are applied to the theme.
- Click Back to return to the Themes page.
Setting visibility for home page and knowledge base elements in your standard theme
In the Copenhagen standard theme, you can easily set visibility for some home page and knowledge base elements for your theme in the settings panel.
To set visibility for home page and knowledge base elements in your theme
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
- Click Customize on the theme you want to update.
- In the Settings panel, click Home page elements, then select or deselect
Recent activity, if you want to add or remove the recent activity feed from
your home page.
- Recent activity shows a list of the five most recent new articles, article comments, new community posts, and community comments on your help center home page.
- Click Article page elements, then select or deselect any of the following options:
- Articles in section displays a list of all articles in the current section in a sidebar on the article.
- Author displays the avatar and name of the author on each article.
- Comments shows all comments at the bottom of the article in order of oldest to newest.
- Follow displays a button on the article so that users can subscribe to the article to receive notifications when new comments are added. Notifications are not sent when the article content is updated.
- Recently viewed displays a list of articles recently viewed by the user in a sidebar on the article.
- Related articles displays a list of related articles, on a relevancy score, in a sidebar on the article, see How is the relate articles list populated.
- Social sharing adds elements for sharing content on social media to the article.
The theme preview updates so that you can see changes as you add or remove elements.
- Click Section page elements, then select or deselect Follow, if you want
to enable users to follow sections.
- Follow displays a button on the section so that users can subscribe to the section to receive notifications when new articles are added to the section and when new comments are added to articles in the section.
- When you're finished, click Save at the top.
The changes are applied to the theme.
- Click Back to return to the Themes page.
Setting visibility for community elements in your standard theme
To set visibility for community elements in your theme
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
- Click Customize on the theme you want to update.
- In the Settings panel, click Community post elements, then select or deselect
any of the following options:
- Follow displays a button on the community post so that users can subscribe to the post to receive notifications when new comments are added.
- Social sharing adds elements for sharing content on social media to the post.
- Click Community topic elements, then select or deselect Follow, if you
want to enable users to follow community topics.
- Follow displays a button on the community topic so that users can subscribe to the topic to receive notifications when new posts are added to the topic and when new comments are added to posts in the topic.
- When you're finished, click Save at the top.
The changes are applied to the theme.
- Click Back to return to the Themes page.
17 Comments
Thanks a lot for your interesting question. You can add a Help Center Greeting using the following way:
1) Open your Guide code editor and then click on "section hero" at home_page.hbs.
Please notice: it's better to add your code before <div class "hero-inner">
2) For my testing purposes, I have added something like this:
<h2 style="color:#blue;font-weight:bold;">Welcome to the Explore Ireland Help Center<h2>
3) Publish results
Hope it helps
Hi, even though I have turned off "community post elements" and "community topic elements" and turned off the community entirely under "Gather settings", the section "Community" and "Join the conversation" are still present in the preview page, but not if you go to the actual published help center.
How can I remove this from the preview page as well?
Is there anything in the standard Copenhagen theme I can use to add a Help Center Greeting/Overview paragraph? Currently the theme shows the top level content (i.e. multiple sections) in boxes only that a user can click on. I want to add a paragraph right above that content that says something like "welcome to the ____ Help Center, here is how to navigate between each of these content areas below" etc.
I am not a developer and was hoping there was a shortcut I could use in the left-side toolbar to accomplish this but I'm not seeing anything so far
How do I disable the Social Media icons under an article I created in guide?
Great questions Dave Jensen and great answer @...!
While the Copenhagen theme does not have this ability in the sidebar settings and requires code customization as Viktor suggests, another option is also to have a look that themes from the Zendesk theme marketplace. Many themes there has this feature.
Hi,
Management wants to hide the search bar on our home page (landing page). I do not see a way of doing this. I need your help!!!
Thanks,
Sue
Hello!
Is there a way to hide the "comment" and "view" totals next to Community Topic posts?
Hi Ruben,
In the Search_results.hbs template, you should be able to comment out that part of the code.
I hope this helps.
Hi everyone,
Quick question: using the standard Copenhagen theme, is there anyway to hide the “sign in” option from end users? Because we customized our help center URL to match our own platform, we don’t want to give end users the impression that they will be logging into our platform when they click that function. Furthermore, none of the elements in our help center require end users to be logged in so we’d rather just remove that option entirely.
If this option is not available in standard Copenhagen theme, would it be something we would be able to implement with a custom theme?
Hi Folks,
So I added code to hide the search from end-users (who do not sign in). Also I added a heading. But it is all jammed up at the top of the section. How do I adjust where the search bar (for users who sign in) and heading (for both users who sign in as well as those who do not) appear?
Hi Susann (Sue) Philbrook,
Hiding the search bar on the home page will require making some changes in your help center code editor. Here's a link to an article that outlines how to make customizations to your help center:
And here's a link to a previous question on the topic of hiding the search bar
I hope this helps! Feel free to reach out with any questions.
Tipene
Style Css
(Also, try to just post your question once – don't worry, we'll see it!) :)
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for that. I was pretty sure I tried that previously but the formatting of the rest of the page was getting messed up. I must have been doing something else that I didn't notice the first time through.
Hi everyone,

I'm trying to hide the article ratings from the search results page. I'm having trouble modifying the code in order to remove this. Would somebody be able to help point me in the right direction?
Thanks!
Hi @Yehudah Rodman,
You might need to tweak the code a little bit and add javascript to check the user role. On the basis of that, you can show and hide the link.
Let me know if this solves your issue.
Thanks
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