What is Community Builder (Site.com)?
After the subsequent Salesforce Releases (Spring ’15 & Summer ’15), Community Designer is more often referred to as Community Builder. Just like Community Designer, it is used to create custom branded pages for communities – but with some updated features. It also provides a single interface to brand or edit pages, update templates, publish changes, and more. With pre-configured templates like Kokua, Koa, Napili and Aloha, Community Builder allows you to:
- Create a self-service community
- Build reusable page elements
- Create data driven pages like product catalogs, listing, etc.
- Design pixel perfect pages
- Create public and private pages within your community
- Create App Launcher using the Aloha template
- Create web-to-lead forms
- Use Site.com Studio within Community Builder to build dynamic web pages
Accessing Community Builder
To customize your community with Salesforce Community Builder, you need to click Customize>Communities>All Communities from Setup. Now click on Manage, which is next to the community name. Then click Launch Community Builder in Community Management. Community Builder will now be ready to use.
Benefits of the updated Community Builder
Lightning Community Builder has eliminated the use of code, but familiarity with html and CSS can be of much help. With latest enhancements available in the Summer ’15 release, Community Builder provides the following benefits:
- Members or users with similar profile or permission can now be a part of a community
- Pages can be built with advanced knowledgebase, Q&A and cases to increase customization
- Napili – the self-service template can be used to attach files from computer or from the community itself
- reCAPTCHA widget can be used for contact support to prevent scammers
- “Make profile public” checkbox in User Settings page can be used to get the user contact information details
- Profiles & Case Lists are now available in Koa and Kokua Templates
- Sandbox can be used to publish community and test changes before the community goes live
- Page editor can be used to style page structure, edit community pages and update community’s template
- Branding editor can be used to upload branding images, change font and colour of the page
Limitations of Community Builder
Although Lightning Community Builder is a convenient tool to customize your community, yet it possesses certain limitations that need to be considered. Community Builder is not capable of:
- providing self-service functionalities like cases, Salesforce knowledge, and Chatter Questions
- supporting other sales, service, or platform use cases
- providing full platform capability
- changing Salesforce tabs+visualforce templates to a community Builder based template as it removes all tabs from your community
- adding vfpages and custom tabs in Napili template
- updating salesforcetabs + visualforce template
- providing Chatter questions in communities that are built on KOA and KOKUA template
- designing communities that are not created on Koa, Kokua, Napili and Aloha templates
Comparison of QuickStart Communities and Community Builder
Contents | Community Builder | QuickStart Communities | ||
Salesforce Objects | ||||
Answers | ||||
Ideas | ||||
Knowledgebase | ||||
Case | ||||
Leads | ||||
Opportunities | ||||
More Custom Objects | ||||
Feed | ||||
Questions | ||||
Design | ||||
Responsive Design template | ||||
Custom CSS | ||||
Fonts | ||||
Embedded Fonts | ||||
Unlimited Pick and Choose Template Library | ||||
Integrations | ||||
Gamification | ||||
SOLR Full Text Search | ||||
Rich User Profiles | ||||
Chatter* | ||||
Google Events | ||||
SEO Possibilities | ||||
Tags | ||||
Keywords | ||||
Search Engine friendly URLs | ||||
Bookmarking on Page Subsets | ||||
Others | ||||
Fast Deployment | ||||
Migration | ||||
Reports on activities | ||||
Dashboard on Activities | ||||
Support on Management |
Best Practices
- You can change the template name, status after clicking on manage>more option
- You can find recommendations on the right side of the page if you are using Napili template
- You can add dashboards, topics, recommendations and administrations from overview tab in community management
- You can customize the community template to update your community’s branding and fonts
- You can add images in topic banner and thumbnails to make community outlook attractive
Planning to setup a custom Salesforce Community?
Disclaimer: Salesforce, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Salesforce Communities, Community Designer, Community Builder, Site.com, Force.com, are all trademarks of Salesforce.com Inc.