Zendesk launched new help-center theming experience in November 2017. It has so far been optional to upgrade to new theming experience.
A few days back Zendesk announced end-of-life for (old) help-center experience, i.e. On June 12, 2018, Zendesk migrate help-centers to new theming experience.
Have you already upgrade your Zendesk Help Center to use new theming experience? If yes, congratulations!
If not, please look at the following checklist before you hit upgrade, or Zendesk starts automatic migration.
Did you get email from Zendesk that your custom theme/assets are not compliant with new limits?
Theming size limits
The following table shows the maximum limits for themes, associated files, and assets in Guide.
| Item | Maximum |
|---|---|
| Total number of themes | 10 |
| Individual theme size | 30MB |
| Total theme assets size | 25MB |
| Individual theme asset size | 5MB |
| Individual theme template size | 300KB |
| Total number of settings in manifest.json | 100 |
| Total number of options in a list type setting | 20 |
Allowable file types for theme assets
The following table shows the file types that are allowed as theme assets. The allowable files types for assets are limited to the file types used in the theming of a Help Center.
| Asset type | File types allowed |
|---|---|
| Images | jpg, png, gif, svg, webp, tiff, bmp |
| Fonts | woff2, woff, eot, otf |
| Text files | js, css, html, json, txt, xml |
| Other | mp4, swf, wav, ogg |
Rich content files types, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and PDFs, can be article attachments but cannot be theme assets.|
Does your Help Center show icons for categories/sections on homepage or other templates?
Diziana Themes used nice method to associate icons with categories and sections by naming assets (icon -- png/jpg) to have same name as category or section id.
That's it, just by following a naming convention categories/sections could have icons which can be displayed anywhere because themes encapsulated rest of the complexity. It was loved by Diziana customers because they didn't need to edit single line of code for this task. That was the past.
The new theming experience has changed things quite a bit. Of course, there is a long list of positives. The downside is it broke themes that relied on aforesaid method for icons.
The new theming experience has changed the way assets are stored on Zendesk CDN, i.e. Zendesk renames asset files, and there is no simple way to figure out URL and use it without using server-side template helper.
We can't, not yet, use asset template helper within template block helper (each); and there isn't a way, not yet, to know asset URL on client side.
We have upgrade our themes to use a two steps process (upload asset, and add some javascript code in document-head) to associate icons with categories/icons.
Please feel free to get in touch with us, and we can help you upgrade your help-center to use new theming experience.