Creating custom pages in the help center

Note: On Suite Growth and Professional or Support with Guide Professional, you have an option to add custom pages, but you won't be able to use them. This behavior is designed so that you can still purchase and install themes that include custom pages from the Marketplace.

Custom pages are unique pages you can create and add to a help center theme. Custom pages don't appear in a section or a topic. Rather, they have their own URLs that you can use to direct users to the pages. You can assign each page a specific URL at the time of development.

You can create custom pages from scratch and then link to them from anywhere in your help center or from any other web page or application. For example, you can use custom pages to create special landing pages for your help center, or even create new pages to embed content from sources outside of Zendesk.

This article covers the following topics:

• Creating custom pages
• Designing custom pages
• Linking to custom pages

Creating custom pages

You can create custom pages in one of two ways. You can either create and customize a page using the Zendesk Curlybars and HTML markup within Guide's theming editor, or you can create and develop the page outside of Zendesk and then import it as part of a theme into the help center.

You can create up to 100 custom pages.

To create custom pages using the theme editor

1. In Guide, click the Customize design icon () in the sidebar.

   The Themes page opens.

2. Click Customize on the theme that you want to edit.
3. Click Edit code.

   

4. Click Add new, then select Custom page.

   

5. For Page name, enter a filename for your page.

   The name becomes part of the page URL.

6. Click Copy next to the URL field to save the URL to your clipboard.

   You’ll need it to add the link to other pages.

   

7. Click Add custom page.

   The custom page appears without content and is listed under the custom_pages section in the sidebar.

   

   To design the page, see Designing custom pages.

To create custom pages using code

As a developer, you can build themes offline and upload them as a ZIP file or use a GitHub repository. To create custom pages using code, create the page as a .hbs file in the following directory: templates/custom_pages. See Working on a theme locally.

Designing custom pages

When you create a custom page, the page is blank. To design a custom page, you can use the Zendesk templating language, also known as Curlybars, as well as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

For more information, see the following templating language references:

• Help center templating cookbook
• Help center CSS cookbook
• Help center JavaScript cookbook
• Using the help center templating language
• Developer templating API documentation - Introduction
• Developer templating API documentation - Helpers

Linking to custom pages

Your content hierarchy is composed of a number of different pages such as sections and topics that make up your help center. Custom pages exist outside of this hierarchy and are not visible to users until they click a direct link to them.

For example, if you create an “About Us” custom page, you can add a link to that page from any help center template, article, or even home page. Users visiting those pages can click the About Us link to view the custom page. If users don’t have access to a link that points to the page, they can still search for it.

The URL of a custom page follows this pattern: "https://{domain_name}/hc[/{locale}]/p/{page_name}". The locale is optional and the page name does not include an .hbs or .html file extension. You can get the page_name from the list of pages in the theme editor. See Creating custom pages.

For example, if your domain name is mondocam.zendesk.com and the page name in the theme is about_us.hbs, the URL will be https://mondocam.zendesk.com/hc/p/about_us.

If you want to insert a link to the custom page in another page or template in the same help center, you can use a relative link such as <a href="/hc/p/about_us">About Us</a>.