Tip of the week: A guide to Help Center for Web Portal users

This tip of the week covers:

• Accessing Web Portal vs Help Center
• Accessing the settings and customization options for Web Portal vs Help Center
• Managing content in Web Portal vs Help Center
• Customizing the interface in Web Portal vs Help Center
• Comparing end-user experience for requests in Web Portal vs Help Center

Accessing Web Portal vs Help Center
First, you’ll need to know how to get to Help Center if you’re used to going to Web portal. To get to Web Portal, you select your user avatar in the upper right. To get to Help Center, you click the Product Tray in the upper right, then select Help Center.

Accessing settings and customization options for Web Portal vs Help Center
In Web Portal, general settings were managed in the agent interface:

Zendesk Settings > Account > Branding

In the Help Center, there are two settings menus listed under General in the top menu bar in Help Center.

Here’s where you enable various features, security settings, and language setting:

General > Help Center Settings

Here’s where you do the web design and customization of Help Center:

General > Customize Design

Managing content in Web Portal vs Help Center

The biggest difference between Web Portal and Help Center, is the Help Center has two different segments for content; Web Portal had one. Help Center has the Knowledge Base and the Community:

• Knowledge Base is all unrestricted agent and moderator created content.

• Community can be both agent created and end-user created content.

Customizing the interface in Web Portal vs Help Center

In Help Center you start with a theme, but you want to change it up; here’s how you can customize your Help Center if you want to put your web dev hat on.

For background, in Web Portal, you added code customizations with widgets (Zendesk Admin Settings > Settings > Extensions). Code customization from Web Portal widgets do not migrate to Help Center.

In Help Center, there’s a development console for you to easily access your Help Center’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the various template pages (General > Customize Design > Edit Theme).

We also created a custom templating language for Help Center called Curlybars (based on Handle bars) to simplify the coding process with prebuilt objects and helpers that enable you to dynamically customize your Help Center.

Here are some links to learn more about the templating language and how to use it:

• Help Center Templates Developer Docs
• Learn to use the Help Center Templating Language
• Help Center Resources Page (including a section with all of our Help Center code customization how-to docs)

Comparing end-user experience for requests in Web Portal vs Help Center

In Web Portal end users went to this form to Submit a Request. In Help Center, end users select Submit a request in the upper right to get to the request form.

Note: Agents do not see the Submit a Request button when logged into Help Center as an agent. To view the request page, go to General > Customize Design and select (lower right) View as: End User.

Head to the forums for this tip in greater detail

Keep the knowledge flowing! For more tips like this, check out Zendesk’s Tip of the Week collection.