Release

Change your community homepage layout

Change your community homepage layout

Get ready to (re)design your community homepage. We have rebuilt the homepage design experience from scratch. Adjust the look and feel of your homepage with just a few clicks. No coding required!

 

 

What can I do with this feature?

  • Add, edit and delete homepage widgets while directly previewing your homepage

  • Place homepage widgets in whatever order you like!

  • Preview (design) changes before publishing

  • Use brand new widgets like: featured topic cards, community navigation cards, leaderboard, container, HTML widget(s)

What is new?
 

Customization mode
A whole new mode to allow you to easily change your homepage layout. Guess what? You won’t need the Control environment to make changes to your homepage anymore! 

Live preview
Preview changes that you make directly. No more jumping back- and forth between Control and your Community layout.

Reorder widgets
Take full control over the position of your homepage widgets. Place important topics on the top of your homepage, above the fold, or place a list of recommended topics right above your footer.

Widget library
Pick homepage widgets that suit your business. Choose from a wide range of widget types like: navigation, topic, promotion, sidebar, custom code

Go full-width
Not a fan of the sidebar? Remove it and apply a full-width design on your homepage

Featured topics (widget)
We improved the featured topics design and added some extras. Add a title and button to the featured topics panel.

Point base leaderboard (widget)
Display a point based list of valuable community members based on their engagement levels.

Community cards (widget)
Promote community parent categories as navigation cards, there are 2 different templates that you can pick.

 

How to get started
 

Simply sign in to a community account with user role Community Manager or Administrator. Go to the homepage and click the nice purple ‘Customize’ button. Of course, we also added some guides and how-to’s to help you get started: 

Enjoy!

Looks good. Can you also make the publish button work, so I can save the changes I made?

Can you also make the publish button work, so I can save the changes I made?

You should be good to go now :)

Simply sign in to a community account with user role Community Manager or Administrator. Go to the homepage and click the nice purple ‘Customize’ button.

Our community team consists of several people with different roles. For example we have administrators, service agents and an editorial staff.
Our editorial staff is tasked with publishing news articles and we promote those articles on our homepage using the new “Featured topics” widget (we replaced the old one that used the moderator tags). We want our editors to have the permissions to edit the homepage in order to change the “Featured topics” widget regularly (3-5 times a week).
But as only the role “Community Manager” or “Administrator” has permissions to change the homepage (and therefore the “Featured topics” widget), we are facing a big issue. We can’t give the editorial staff the “Community Manager” role as this role comes with a wide range of other permissions (more or less full permissions) that we cannot grant them due to several reasons (e.g. legal reasons).

We have been using a workaround for a few weeks now tasking an administrator to change the homepage every time a new article needs to be promoted. Our editorial staff publishes an articles, sends a briefing to the administrator and the administrator takes time out of his other tasks to change the “Featured topics” widget on the homepage”. This clearly isn’t a solution that can go on much longer. (Spoiler: I’m the administrator.)

That’s why we ask for more granular permissions for custom user roles so we can easily set up an “Editorial Staff” user role and grant permissions to change the homepage (or even better: only change the “Featured topics” widget) to this role.  

Thanks for sharing this use case Björn, I can feel your pain – one thing that we listed as improvement is the possibility to feature a topic directly from control when creating a new article, or within the topic moderation page (a setting/switch to add to featured topics widget, just like making it sticky). You still have to jump back and forth between topics in Control to unfeature and feature them – but it can be done by the editorial staff themselves

Hi @Yoeri, I have another (small) thing.

Labels / pills throughout the community use the branded color (green circles on the screenshot). The labels / pills in the new Featured Topics widgets use the secondary color (red circles on the screenshot). I propose to make it consistent.

 

Good catch!

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