Multi-Level Community Forums
We're looking to start aggressively building the community forum section of our site, but I feel we're a little bit limited in what can be accomplished off the bat. I'd love a way to add another level on the forums - for example, our Knowledge Base articles follow this format:
* Category
* Topic
* Article
while our communities are:
* Topic
* Article
any way to add another level to this would allow us to split up our forum in a much neater manner - I believe I saw mention of it in Help Desk 1.0, but not in 2.0.
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If you don't mind me asking, what was your workaround?
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Justin,
the workaround currently proposed and what I believe Zunaira and her team went with - is something similar to what we have in our own Zendesk Community: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics (Click topics)
Where you can see the topics have been organised under several different headlines. This is not really a workaround to the specific problem but something that might work in some cases to get an extra layer of organisation.
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+1!
Our biggest struggle right now is attempting to engage the community in addition to our Idea Portal. Our idea portal lives technically as a community topic, however because of this limitation, feedback on all parts of our product are limited to one space and the lack of tags makes it very difficult to keep track of and glean good data from.
Being able to great sub-topics would specifically allow us to do the following:
Community page with 5 topics:
Community guidelines, What's New, Q+A, User Tips and Ideas --> a user clicks on ideas and there are another group of subtopics that allow them to give us feedback/ideas regarding a specific topic/purpose within our software.
We need this badly!!!! Looking at other idea portal options and we don't want to have to do that!
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Oscar Junker, how do you achieve what you have in your Zendesk community right now? We desperately need to do something like this as well.
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@Farid, this was done by using custom code in our Guide theme. While this isn't something we can assist with, I encourage you to take a look at some useful documentation we have available around Help Center customization:
- Using themes and templates to customize your Help Center
- Help Center CSS Cookbook
- Help Center Templates Introduction
- Help Center Javascript Cookbook
- Tips for using HTML to customize your Help Center
Cheers!
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Brett,
Thank you for the links.. I guess I'm looking for more specific direction in terms of how it was pulled off. Did you hard-code the main categories and which forums go in each one? And can you help point me to a direction on how to accomplish the responsive Categories container?
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Hi Farid,
These topics have been hard-coded on each card but my knowledge around what code was used is rather limited. I'll leave this post open in case other users want to offer up some advice for you.
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Hey Farid -
They don't provide the exact code, but here are a couple of posts that our development team who did the customization created about how they did it:
Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 1: How we use Zendesk features
Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 2: How we use open source tools
I hope those help!
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We want to add a second level in the community: Current topics and Other topics. We use the community for software developments. The current topics are related to our roadmap.
Is there more information about the release date for this development?
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Hi there,
You can get an additional level in your Zendesk community by grouping topics.
If you need help with it, we can do it for you.
Best regards,
Lotus Themes
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Hi Nicole, any roadmap update on this?
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Hi Nikolaus -
The product team remains aware of and interested in eventually developing this, but it is not on the roadmap for 2020.
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Hi,
Has there been any movement on this particular feature request? This is something we could definitely use!
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Hi Sandra -
It's a request that the product team is definitely aware of but has not been able to put on the roadmap at this time - there are other features that have been deemed a higher priority for the currently planned development cycles.
But folks should continue to up-vote the original post if it's something you'd like to see!
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Hey!
Old post, but we really have this need also.
What about this tabbing- and grouping of topics you guys at Zendesk are using yourself? https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
Is it available in your product?
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Hi Magnus -
Additional levels for the community haven't been developed yet. As far as the tabbing and grouping on our own community topics page, those are all theme customizations. While they aren't available out of the box or as a downloadable theme, our engineering team did write a couple of posts on how they went about implementing it here:
Introduction to how we did Zendesk's Help Center theme customization
Zendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 1: How we use Zendesk featuresZendesk's Help Center theme customization, part 2: How we use open source tools
I hope that helps, but let us know if you have additional questions!
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Thanks! I will look into this.
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My company is new to the Zendesk suite and while we appreciate the availability of Community as a service, it lacks modern features, i.e., nesting of topics, this would make the product that much better.
Topic > Sub-Topic > Post & Topic > Sub-Topic > Sub-Topic > Post are common themes among many, if not all, Forum platforms.
Please, Zendesk make this available soon!
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We would really benefit from being able to add additional tiers to our community forums. It is way too limited to only have topics and posts and some of our topics are getting really junked up due to this.
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