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Zendesk Guide Theme Boilerplate

This is a boilerplate theme for the new Zendesk Guide, that precompiles the template, style and script files, so you can do various things, that isn't possible when working directly with Zendesks theme editor.

How to's

Include a partial

  • Place the partial in src/partials
  • Insert <include src="your-partial-name.hbs"></include> in a template file
  • After compilation the include tag will be replaced with the contents of your partial file

Insert environment specific data

If you are developing the theme in a local environment, and moving it to another help center when it is production-ready, then you might sometimes need to remember to change some id's or other stuff that changes per environment. Not anymore!

  • In /config.js you insert the variables that you want to use in your templates.
  • The key that you write is the one that you will refer to from template and sass files, and the value is the one that will be compiled into the template.
  • When running gulp you can pass an environment: gulp build --env local. This will set the environment to 'local' and the .local.env file will be used to load environment specific data into Node's process.env object. This is already set up as scripts in package.json, so you can just npm run build-dev (or yarn build-dev) or npm run build-production.

Insert config variable in a template file

Inside any of the template files you can insert the value of a variable from the config file by writing {{% variable_name %}}. That will simply compile to the value of the variable.

Insert config variable in sass

All the config variables are also available in sass. You can simply refer to any of the variables as you would with normal sass variables, e.g. color: $primary-color. If you want to use a variable as the name of a class or id you can do it like this: .#{$variable_name} { color: green } or ##{$variable_name} { color: red }.

Insert config variable in javascript

To access the config variables in javascript, use the _config object, e.g. _config.category_ticket_field. You do not need to import the config file anywhere, it's automatically available through webpack's define plugin.

Use Zendesk settings variable in sass

When using the zendesk theme editor to write css, you can insert settings variables, and Zendesk will compile their values. However when trying to use one of these values when precompiling our theme, node-sass will try to compile a variable that doesn't exist. So we have to escape these variables. We can do this using the sass unquote() function. Example: background-image: url(unquote("$homepage_background_image"));

Using control structures inside templates (if/else, switch, loops)

To use control structures in the template files, please refer to the posthtml-expressions documentation at https://github.com/posthtml/posthtml-expressions

Automatically add icons to categories

If you put an image named cat-icon_{category_id}.{file_extension}, e.g. cat-icon_115000739129.png into the dist/assets folder, it will automatically be made available as an object in the format { cat_id: filename }. Then you can put the following loop into your category loop on the home page:

<each loop="fileName, id in category_icons">
    {{#is id {{% id %}} }}
        <img src="{{asset '{{% fileName %}}'}}" />
    {{/is}}
</each>

Theme preview using ZAT (Zendesk App Tools)

To preview the theme while developing you can use ZAT. Please refer to the following article on how to install ZAT: https://help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/229489288
Once installed you can run zat theme preview from inside the dist folder. You can also refer to the following article for more info on zat theme preview: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012793547-Using-local-theme-preview-Guide-Professional-

Assets, settings, translations

All your assets, settings, translations, manifest and so on, can be put directly into their respective locations inside the dist/ folder, as they are not compiled. The dist/ folder follows the exacts structure of exported themes from Zendesk Guide.

Compiling and packaging (zip)

To compile for production and make a zip file run npm run package.

Known issues

PostHtml parser vs handlebars syntax

Because PostHtml parses html into an AST (abstract syntax tree), it is important that the handlebars syntax does not get in the way of valid html. The following will therefore cause wrong rendering:

<tr {{#is status 'closed'}} class="request-closed" {{/is}}>

Instead it can be written like this:

<tr class="{{#is status 'closed'}}request-closed{{/is}}">

Copenhagen theme

We have included template and SASS files from the original copenhagen theme, which is publicly available here: https://github.com/zendesk/copenhagen_theme