Modifying CSS to Customize your Help Center

Modifying CSS to Customize your Help Center

Many times you'll want to customize specific elements like an article details page, add ticket form, topic lists, or anything else visible on the help center theme. You might also want to edit it globally (on the entire help center) or only for specific categories. In these cases, you'll need to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to customize the style of your theme.

But if you're new to this whole CSS thing, you need to understand a couple of things. Elements of your help center are given classes and id's. You set styles for specific classes and id's in your help center theme's CSS section. The most powerful tool at your disposal for this task is your browser inspector, which will show you all the CSS associated with any part of your help center page. The inspector will help you identify the selector or original style containing the properties you want to change. You can then copy these selectors over to your CSS customization box, to add your custom properties.

In this guide, we'll share the properties that you can customize and also demonstrate a CSS customization that you can accomplish on the help center.



As you can see in the screenshot above, our help center page code starts with the line:

<portal data-reactroot class="html articleSubCategory signedIn zohodesk">
This is the root element of the React component where you can customize the appearance and behavior of your help center in a clear and secure way. It consists of three different class attributes and let's look at each one of them below:
  1. articleSubCategory: This attribute defines the pages on which customization should be applied, so that the style won't apply anywhere else. The following table lists the other attributes that shall be referred to while performing customizations.

    Page
    Class Name
      Home
      home
      Ticket List
      ticketList
      Ticket Detail
      ticketDetail
      Add Ticket
      ticketForm
      KB Category List
      kbLanding
      KB Subcategory
      article_subcategory
      Article List
      articleList
      Article Detail
      articleDetail
      Community Category
      communityLanding
      Topic List
      communityList
      Topic Detail
      communityDetail
      Add Topic
      topicForm
      User Profile
      userProfile
      Sign in
      signin
      Signed-in
      signedIn
      Sign up
      signup
      Forgot Password
      forgetPwd

  2. signedIn: This attribute defines the authentication status of a user. When specified, the customization is shown for users signed in to your help center. You can remove this attribute while making global changes.
  3. zohodesk: This attribute refers to the name of the category. When specified, the customization is shown for users accessing the specific knowledge base category.

Sample CSS Customization
Let's look at a sample CSS customization script that removes the background image on the header and adds a background color to the "KB Subcategory" page.

Before Customization



After Customization



You can use the following CSS code to customize the page as above:

.articleSubCategory .Header__header{
	background-image: none;
	background-color: red
}

    • Related Articles

    • Advanced Help Center Customization Using HTML and CSS

      You can customize the appearance of the Help Center using the basic color themes. However, it has its limitations, as it doesn't allow you to rebuild the header and the footer completely as you like it to be. Here comes the advanced customization ...

    • How to customize the Help Center?

      In just a few easy steps, you can customize the Help Center platform which allows your customers to find answers for their queries by going through your articles and forums or by raising a ticket directly from the page. You can set colors, add custom ...

    • 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 ...

    • Customizing Help Center Home Page

      Customize the way your Help Center content is organized using the simple drag-drop method in Zoho Desk. You can add custom widgets, show or hide tabs and customize their appearance to keep your customers engaged with the right content at the right ...

    • How to remove the header and footer of my Help Center?

      You can remove or customize the header and footer of your Help Center pages by customizing its HTML. To remove or customize the header and footer, follow the steps mentioned below: Click the Setup icon (  ) in the top bar. Click Help Center under ...