Adding a notification banner to your Help Center v2

Stuart Buddrige - Sorry but I can no longer assist as I don't have access to Zendesk anymore as my organization moved to a different product that was built for K12.  The best person to ask would be Trapta Singh who is a coding guru.

ModeratorWes do you have any insight into my recent comments about making an article invisible, yet still being able to display the banner on the site?

Many thanks in advance!

Good to know - that will save me some time on testing! And yes, fingers crossed for an answer from somebody else.

Thank you again for your reply and help.

Stuart Buddrige Yup, same process I have. I have tested the visibility permissions and found that if someone can't see the article, they also can't see the banner. I hope there is a way around this, as it would clean up my knowledge base a little bit, I just haven't found a way in my fiddling with it. 

Here's hoping someone else has a better answer! 

Thank you for your reply Kyle B - much appreciated.

Yes, similarly I have 2 themes at present, one normal theme and then one with a banner so when there is an incident, we can just set the live theme to be the one with the banner.

Your approach makes sense, but I would be interested to hear if there is a way to keep the content as an article but make it invisible. I guess you could possibly set the 'Visible to' option in an article to Agents and Admins only?

Stuart Buddrige This is how I have mine setup:

I actually have mutliple Guide templates, one for no banner, one for a red banner (hard down), and one for an orange banner (possible issue kind of thing). I also have two outage articles that will match the banner color. That way I can keep the text the same (or change a few words to make it accurate) and just publish when needed. 

That being said, when I have a banner in place, the article is visible to everyone. That's the only way I was able to get the banner to work properly. Maybe others have a better way, but I have created a section for these notification articles, put that section at the bottom of the list, and only have those two articles in there. That way, when there is no notification banner, the articles are set to Draft and that section is not visible. When there is a banner in place, someone could scroll down and see that section, which shows the article, but I have it 'clean' enough to be ok with that. 

So, in short, the way I have it setup is to burry the article as much as I can as it will be visible. If you restrict people from seeing the actual article, they also won't see the banner. The only way around this is to manually add the text in the banner instead of tying it to an article. It's more work but definitely diable. 

Hi Trapta Singh - I wonder if I can ask your help again on this. 

As the text that is in the banner is linked to an actual article and triggered via the 'alert' label, how can I keep that specific article from being visible on the site itself as an article in its own right, whilst keeping the banner that it produces visible?

When you publish an article it asks you to publish it to a certain category/section - but if I do this, users will then just be able to see the banner as an article which would be odd. Is there a way to invisibly publish an article so users cannot see it as an article, but the content from it can still be used in a banner?

Many thanks in advance!

Hi Trapta Singh

I got this working - thank you for your response. Much appreciated.

WOW six years and it still works :-)

Trapta Singh - Thanks for helping out!!

Brett Bowser & Christopher Kennedy - I created this solution 6 years ago when the Help Center was just a baby to fill a need.  Now the Help Center is all grown up so let's get this solution baked into the actual product!!!

Hi Stuart Buddrige,

Yes, the above solution still works. The only change should be with the file's name. You can refer to my comment above for the same.

Thanks

Trapta