How to customize help center themes in the sandbox?

How to customize help center themes in the sandbox?

Personalizing your help center is a must if you believe in making it look appealing for your end users. But it gets frustrating to tweak your help center to perfection while it’s live. What if a new theme renders your help center inaccessible? Or it makes your help center look terrible? It’s far from ideal, sure, but not anymore!

Zoho Desk enables you to create sandbox themes where you can test and experiment without fear of affecting your live instance.  You can create a new sandbox anytime you want, but you can only have one per theme at a time.

Creating a Sandbox Theme
The sandbox theme is created with settings from the current production instance of your Help Center. This means that you will be able to see the tabs, buttons, widgets, and contents that are available in the production instance.

To create a sandbox:
  1. Click the Setup icon (  ) in the top bar.
  2. Click Help Center under the Channels menu.
  3. Select the Help Center for which you want to apply the theme.
  4. Click Help Center Customization under the Help Center sub-menu.
    The Themes page appears.
  5. Create a sandbox theme by performing these steps:
    1. Click Preview corresponding the theme that you'd like to customize.
      This will open a preview of the theme.
    2. Click Save Draft at the top of the preview page.
    3. In the confirmation dialog box, click Save.
      You've now created a sandbox environment for the theme.
    4. Make changes to the theme, take a preview, and fine tune.
    5. Click Save Draft again, to save the changes you made.
    6. In the confirmation dialog box, click Save.

Here are some of the actions you can perform in the sandbox:
  1. Click the More icon (  ) at the top of the page and then click Draft to preview the Help Center on a new window. Note that this preview mirrors a production instance in configuration, enabling you to test signups, fine-tune widgets, and experiment with tabs without affecting your customers. You can also share the preview URL with other users to speed up decision-making at your organization.



  2. Click the More icon (  ) at the top of the page and then click Reset to default to reset your sandbox if you mess up and want to start from scratch.
  3. Click Preview at the top of the page to view the way your help center looks on desktop, tablet, and mobile by toggling between each of the device views at the top of the window.



Publishing a Sandbox Theme
Once you're satisfied with the changes, you must publish the sandbox theme in the production instance. You can do this while in the sandbox by clicking on the Publish button at the top of the page. On publishing the theme, click the More icon (  ) at the top of the page and then click Published to view how it appears in the production instance.

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