Salesforce Community Cloud has received Lightning love in recent releases. In this blog post we walk through some of the new Lightning interfaces and packaging capability enhancements. Community Cloud is not only an ideal platform for ISVs to innovate and build solutions, it’s a perfect collaboration product for your business to connect to your partners and customers.
Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt is a new framework for deploying communities faster. Now, you can leverage Lightning Components to build Bolt solutions that have deep business logic and workflow built-in, including e-commerce, recommendation engines, case management and more, all with drag and drop ease.
Lightning Bolt allows ISVs to export templates and pages to distribute to customers. Build industry-specific solutions for others to reuse and enhance. The result? A dramatic reduction in development time and cost.
The screenshot below shows how a template can be exported out of Community Builder for distribution:
Once exported, you can use the Salesforce wizard to package and distribute as a managed or unmanaged package. As an ISV, you can distribute as a managed package to protect your IP.
Your IP will include design, object model, Lightning components and other code that was necessary to build the communities.
As a subscriber, the installation is similar to a standard package installation. When the administrator creates a new community, the wizard will display the template for selection. The screenshot below shows the community creation wizard in the subscriber org. You can clearly see the template that was exported from the publisher org is now among the available templates.
Modify Search Screen or Profile Menu Screen
A common customer request is the ability to modify the search component on top of communities, so that users can search content not only from Salesforce but from multiple sources.
The new Lightning search interface is provided to build a custom styled search box.
Similarly, for the Profile menu customization, one can implement profileMenuInterface.
Rebrand with Custom Theme Layouts
Theme layout is the top level layout of the template pages. It includes headers, footers, navigations and search. The power of using this is flexibility to customize the header, footers, navigation and provide your community with custom themes.
Developers can implement forceCommunity:themelayout to implement custom branding and themes.
Create Customized Page Layouts with Content Layouts
Page layouts in Community Builder can be further customized using Lightning interface forceCommunity:layout.
More Cool Features
Apart from these interfaces, you can also use some really cool features of the Lightning component framework that came with Winter ’17 like base components, quick actions, new events like lightning:openFile, and more.
Additional features in Winter ’17 like SEO, ability to add Google Analytics, add reports / dashboards, and display external data, take the product one step further. The sky’s the limit for innovation with all these cool features added to the platform.
At CodeScience we have deep expertise in building managed package solutions and Lightning components. We are here to help you succeed. Contact our team today to schedule a time to talk.
