Custom Blocks are an effective way to display information on the homepage of the Health & Wellness Theme.

How they work

Custom blocks enable you to link content to your users. They can link to either content within your Help Centre, or a seperate website or portal. They are manually controlled, meaning they do not automatically show the most popular article or resource. They're created to be a visually appealing way of promoting a resource, so you need to ensure you have an image to upload that is relevant to the content. 

There are a maximum of 8 available to use on the homepage, in 2 seperate rows. We recomend when using two rows, to use Photos for one, and icons for other. This will make the page more visually appealing by having a diversity of image type. 

How to edit:

1. Go to your Theming Pages (eg: yourdomain.zendesk.com/theming).
2. Click 'Customize' on the Health & Wellness Theme.
3. Scroll down to either 'Custom Blocks 1' or 'Custom Blocks 2'

Row settings

Each row has 4 settings to change the overall layout:

Custom Blocks image type Amount per row: This is handy when using all 4 blocks, as you may want to display two rows of two or one row or 4. Image height: Adjust this to change the overall maximum height of the block Custom Blocks Title: This is the text that will be shown directly a

Block settings

Each block has 3 settings:

Block image: Upload the image or icon here. Images should be roughly between 300-700px wide. Ideally no larger than 500kb in size. For icons, ideally SVG should be used Block URL: When linking to external sources, this must start with https://... For internal links, you can either place the full link, or start from/hc/ (eg: /hc/articles/how-to-link). Content for Block: Can simply be a title for the block, or, using the advanced setting, many details can be entered to customize the look and feel

Other display options:

There are other under Homepage Settings that can influence the visibility / style of the Custom Blocks:

Border / Block Style: Change the look of the background element of the Custom Blocks Show Custom Blocks: Turn on or off seperate sections. Good if you want to quickly turn off a whole row to prepare them for a forthcoming launch

Simple vs Advanced Custom Blocks

When inserting information into the content field. You can choose whether to simply input a title, or much more by inputting an advanced Custom Block line:

Simple	Advanced

Advanced Custom Blocks

When inserting an Advanced Custom block, the easiest thing to do is simply copy either the text below or the Themes default advanced text. Then edit in a simple text editor and paste back into the theme.

Default settings:

TITLE:Setting up your account || 
DESCRIPTION:Learn how to setup your account with this easy to follow article || 
READING-TIME:10mins || 
TYPE:ARTICLE || 
NEW-WINDOW:TRUE || 
DYNAMIC-LINK:FALSE || 
NEW-WINDOW-STYLE:INVERT || 
BUTTON:View Article || 
BUTTON-ARROW:TRUE

How the advanced text work: 

• There are currently 9 settings available to use. 
• Each setting is separated by two pipes: || 
• You don't have to include all of these in the text. For instance you may only use the title and button text to ensure both of those elements appear

Anatomy of Custom Blocks

TYPE: This is a great way to quickly give the user an idea of the content category. Is it a link, article? Is it related to a specific type of industry or topic? NEW-WINDOW: Enabling this option will generate this icon at the top right hand corner so the user is aware that the link will open in a new window. You can also invert the colours of this using NEW-WINDOW-STYLE:INVERT. TITLE: The title of the block DESCRIPTION: Insert a short description about the content type READING-TIME: This is a helpful way to indicate that the link is quick and easy to digest, which can motivate the user to open the link as the know it's not a large time commitment BUTTON: Insert a simple button, this is a great way to let the user know exactly what type of link they are opening. Is it an article, or a link to a portal? You can also add an optional arrow by adding BUTTON-ARROW:TRUE DYNAMIC-LINK: This setting can be used for allocating the link to a piece of Dynamic Content. This is generally only used if you require the link to change, depending on the users language. By default, we recommend having this set to FALSE or simply removing it.

Question: Why can't these all be seperate settings?!

We'd love to make all of these options easier to configure, but unfortunately Zendesk has a limit to how many settings are available in Theme settings. Until that is changed, we've chosen this inovative way of allowing more functionality without compromising other features that we want to make available.

 

Have feedback or having issues getting it working?

Let us know here, be sure to include the Advanced text you're using and as much detail as possible. We'll be more than happy to help!