• Colin Piper

  • April 08, 2015 07:21

  Brenda, in my experience the answers are as follows:

  1) You cannot turn it off again but Zendesk can. I doubt though that they would want to do this for every customer and maybe not immediately so if you have a friendly Zendesk contact then I would speak to them first and make arrangements.

  2) Yes, customers would need to navigate to the correct URL but I am finding that somehow or another customers tend to find their way there without being told. Things like the sign in page and lost password etc all now lead in this direction. Well that's my experience anyhow.

  What I did was to place a temporary landing page and then build my content behind it where my testers had to naviagte to hidden urls. 

• Brenda L.

  • April 08, 2015 08:16

  Hi Colin,

  Thanks for your speedy and helpful reply! I was hoping I could switch back to setup mode but it sounds like when I activate our Help Center it will be for good.

  I unfortunately don't have time to build a temporary landing page (although that would have been brilliant) so I will just be aware that others will surely find their way there once we're live...even without any promotion. :)

   

• Wes Drury

  • April 08, 2015 11:59
  • Edited

  @Brenda - Lucky for you I've already built a temporary landing page.   All you need to do is copy and paste and change the images if you would like.  You can preview it here:

  https://moderatorwes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/

  For full details see here:

  https://support.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/posts/202809313-Help-Center-Custom-Theme-3-PreLaunch-Theme-?locale=en-us

  If you have any issues just let me know.  Hopefully this helps and best of luck.

• Brenda L.

  • April 08, 2015 18:22

  Wow. That landing page is awesome, Wes. Thank you for the help and the good wishes! 

• Evan

  • April 13, 2015 19:20

  Hi Wes,

  I am in a similar situation (I'd like to preview our Help Center content from our mobile app without any of that content being public).

  A theme like this one would be nice in that it prevents someone from wandering in to our help center, but couldn't anyone still access our articles given a direct link?

• Wes Drury

  • April 13, 2015 19:46

  @Brenda - Thanks for the feedback and goodluck.  I also have two full custom responsive themes available.  You can find both of them from this link:

  https://support.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/posts/203459556-Help-Center-Custom-Responsive-Theme-1?locale=en-us

• Wes Drury

  • April 13, 2015 19:53

  @Evan - With my responsive themes I recommend turning off the Zendesk mobile app so that your Help Center looks the same across all devices.  Yes if given a direct link someone could access your articles. I didn't theme the article page for this particular theme but it wouldn't be hard to do and the end user would only see that article and nothing else.

  I don't know how many articles that you have but you could move them to a different category so the end user would get the error page which you could let them know you are currently updating your knowledge base.  Just a couple of thoughts.  Hopefully this helps and if you have any further questions just let me know.

   

• Evan

  • April 13, 2015 20:34

  Thanks for the quick response, Wes!

  We haven't launched yet, and we're trying to build our Help Center experience, which will be mostly geared towards the mobile app. For this reason, we'd like to preview the Help Center primarily from our mobile app.

  However, we can't risk having any of our help content be public, as that would mean the details of our experience would be public as well.

  I'm getting the sense that the only way to do this would be to hide our Help Center behind a login (which we won't want to do when we actually launch)

   

• Wes Drury

  • April 14, 2015 00:28

  @Evan - Yes setting the Help Center so only logged in users can access will work as well.  I would just test to make sure it prevents the log in from the mobile app as sometimes the Help Center and the mobile app don't abide by the same rules.

• Anthony Severo

  • August 17, 2016 20:37

  My apologies that I don't fully understand implementation of the Help Center, but I am curious what suggestions there are when getting ready to roll-out the new theme? 

  I'm expecting we'll need several passes at our Help Center before it is ready for customers, but have been advised to make it active as soon as possible. How would I test/tweak another theme without changing the landing page people see if they stumble upon our Help Center early?

  Thanks for any assistance that anyone can provide! I am kind of surprised there's not more documentation/specific instructions for staging a Help Center, even though I've been activating as soon as possible is the best method to address any potential issues with domain masking links in the future.

• Wes Drury

  • August 17, 2016 20:51
  • Edited

  @Anthony - You can easily change themes and edit them without interfering with your current theme.  You can save your changes and work on a new theme for a long as you want.  Don't hit the "PUBLISH" button as thats when it will affect your end-users.

   "SAVE" button = good, "PUBLISH button = bad until its ready.

  You can switch to a new theme and edit all you want and once you are ready to roll out a new theme just hit "PUBLISH" and then it will be active.  Any custom theme that you work on will be at the very bottom of the list and named Custom Theme which you have the ability to edit it.

  Hope this helps and if you have further questions or would like to see screenshots just let me know.

• Anthony Severo

  • August 17, 2016 21:07

  @Wes Thanks much for that. I just tried updating to your PreLaunch theme and and must have done something wrong. When I saved the changes I got a popup from clicktime.zendesk.com which says "For security reasons, framing is not allowed".

  I'm now unable to change anything about the theme - after closing that popup, I'm brought to an uneditable page (screenshot) . What did I do and can I undo it? Thanks so much.

• Anthony Severo

  • August 17, 2016 21:25

  I was able to quickly switch themes in a different browser so I'm back to being able to edit thankfully. If you have a chance to assist with whatever error I ran into so I can see if PreLaunch will work for us that would be great. Thanks again.

• Wes Drury

  • August 17, 2016 21:40

  @Anthony - For that particular theme you have to download a few of the files into your Asset area and then point to them in your Document Head but I'll take a look and make sure it works with the new Help center platform.

• Anthony Severo

  • August 17, 2016 21:56

  Got it. I think this level of editing is probably above my skill set then. I'm not confident I will change the right links or that I fully understand what they should redirect to. I will either have a colleague make the changes or find another method. I appreciate you confirming the files will work in the new Help Center platform though!

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