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Change from Help Center to a New Template

Changing from a help center template to another template type is a simple process in itself. But the complexity increases with the things you must consider and actions you must take before you make the change. The complexity of a template change varies according to how much original help center content and configuration you want to preserve in the new template. Keep in mind that Salesforce partners have considerable experience with making template changes and can assist you with this process.

Required Editions

Available in: Essentials, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions
User Permissions Needed
To change a help center template
  • Create and Set Up Experiences
Important
Important Before you change templates in a production environment, try it out in your sandbox first. If you don’t try it out in your sandbox, you run a strong risk of losing data, wasting time, and creating unnecessary cost.

In a template change, some objects and configurations are preserved and some aren’t.

Preserved after a Template Change
  • Featured and navigational topics
  • Topic-to-article mapping
  • Data category-to-topic mapping
  • Data about trending articles and topics
  • Topic statistics
  • Your help center URL (but keeping the same URL is optional)
Not Preserved after a Template Change
  • Your custom pages–There’s a workaround. You can export your custom pages before you change templates. After you change templates, you can import them into the new template.
  • Specific component configuration–Some configuration is preserved, like featured topics, navigational topics, and topic-to-article mapping. Some configuration isn’t preserved, like search and type-ahead search configuration. A template change offers an opportunity to revisit component configuration. For example, in your help center, you let customers search articles and cases. In your new template environment, you can widen your list of searchable objects to make many more object types easy to discover.
  • Branding–Before you change templates, consider whether you want to change or preserve brands in the new template. If you decide to keep the same brand, all the image assets used in the original template are available in your org’s asset library. You have access to this library in Experience Builder under Theme | Images.
  • Theme–When you change templates, the theme defaults to the new template’s theme. You can reuse theme elements from the original template by grabbing them from your org’s asset library.
  • CSS styles–You can copy your CSS styles under Theme | Edit CSS, and paste them into a text file. After you switch templates, you can copy-and-paste your CSS from the text file into the new site.

After you preserve the things you want to retain from your original help center, you’re ready to change templates.

  1. Ensure that you have the latest version of the help center template.
    1. In Create and Set Up Experiences, open Settings, and click Updates.
    2. Confirm that you understand the update changes, and click Update.
    3. In the confirmation dialog, click Update. In the success dialog, click Close.
  2. In the Administration Workspace, click Settings | Change Template. A message warns you that changing your siteʼs template permanently deletes all existing customizations and pages.
  3. Click the tile for the template you’re changing to.
  4. Click Get Started.
  5. In the Name field, enter a name for your site.
  6. In the URL field, enter the value you used for your help center or enter a new value.
  7. Click Create.

After your new template is in place, bring in the elements from the original help center template that you want to preserve. For example:

  • Import the custom pages you exported from your help center.
  • Configure page components.
  • Apply branding.
  • Adjust your theme, including pasting the custom CSS styles you preserved.
  • If you had featured topics in the help center, you can drag the Featured Topics component onto your Home page. Your original configuration of the Featured Topics component is preserved in the new template.

See Also