The Copenhagen theme is the default Zendesk Guide theme. It is designed to be responsive and accessible. Learn more about customizing Zendesk Guide here.
The Copenhagen theme for Help Center consists of:
This is the latest version of the Copenhagen theme available for Guide. It is possible to use this repository as a starting point to build your own custom theme. You can fork this repository as you see fit. You can use your favorite IDE to develop themes and preview your changes locally in a web browser using ZCLI. For details, read the zcli themes documentation.
Once you have forked this repository you can feel free to edit templates, CSS, JavaScript and manage assets.
The manifest allows you to define a group of settings for your theme that can then be changed via the UI in Theming Center. You can read more about the manifest file here.
If you have a variable of type file
, you need to provide a default file for that variable in the /settings
folder. This file will be used on the settings panel by default and users can upload a different file if they like.
Ex.
If you would like to have a variable for the background image of a section, the variable in your manifest file would look something like this:
{
...
"settings": [{
"label": "Images",
"variables": [{
"identifier": "background_image",
"type": "file",
"description": "Background image for X section",
"label": "Background image",
}]
}]
}
And this would look for a file inside the settings folder named: background_image
You can add assets to the asset folder and use them in your CSS, JavaScript and templates. You can read more about assets here
After you have customized your theme you can download the repository as a zip
file and import it into Theming Center.
You can follow the documentation for importing here.
You can also import directly from GitHub - learn more here.
The theme includes all the templates that are used for a Help Center that has all the features available. List of templates in the theme:
- Article page
- Category page
- Community post list page
- Community post page
- Community topic list page
- Community topic page
- Contributions page
- Document head
- Error page
- Footer
- Header
- Home page
- New community post page
- New request page
- Requests page
- Search results page
- Section page
- Subscriptions page
- User profile page
You can add up to 10 optional templates for:
- Article page
- Category page
- Section page
You do this by creating files under the folders templates/article_pages
, templates/category_pages
or templates/section_pages
.
Learn more here.
We use Rollup to compile the JS and CSS files that are used in the theme - style.css
and script.js
. Do not edit these directly as they'll be regenerated during release.
To get started:
$ yarn install
$ yarn start
This will compile all the source code in src
and styles
and watch for changes. It will also start preview
.
Notes:
- We intentionally do not use babel when compiling
script.js
so we can get a clean bundle output. Make sure to only use widely supported ecmascript features (ES2015). - Do not edit
style.css
,script.js
and the files inside theassets
folder directly. They are regenerated during release. - Preview requires login so make sure to first run
yarn zcli login -i
if you haven't done that before.
The Copenhagen theme comes with a few JavaScript assets, but you can add other assets to your theme by placing them in the assets
folder.
From version 4.0.0, the Copenhagen theme uses some React components to render parts of the UI. These components are located in the src/modules
folder and are built using the Zendesk Garden component library.
These components are bundled as native JavaScript modules as part of the Rollup build process, and they are emitted as JS files in the assets
folder. Since assets are renamed when a theme is installed, the modules needs to be imported using the asset helper.
To make the process of importing the modules easier, we added a Rollup plugin that generates an import map that maps the module name to the asset URL. This import map is then injected into the document_head.hbs
template during the build.
For example, if you defined a module named my-module
in the src/modules/my-module
folder, you can add it to the rollup.config.mjs
file like this:
export default defineConfig([
// ...
// Configuration for bundling modules in the src/modules directory
{
// ...
input: {
"my-module": "src/modules/my-module/index.js",
},
// ...
},
]);
Rollup will generate a file named my-module-bundle.js
in the assets
folder and this import map will be added to the document_head.hbs
template:
<script type="importmap">
{
"imports": {
"my-module": "{{asset 'my-module-bundle.js'}}"
}
}
</script>
You can then import the module in your templates like this:
I18n is implemented in the React components using the react-i18next library. We use a flat JSON file and we use .
as a separator for plurals, which is different from the default _
and it is configured during initialization.
We also added some tools to be able to integrate the library with the internal translation system used at Zendesk. If you are building a custom theme and you want to provide your own translations you can refer to the library documentation to setup the loading of your translations.
Translation strings are added directly in the source code, usually using the useTranslation
hook, passing the key and the default English value:
import { useTranslation } from "react-i18next";
function MyComponent() {
const { t } = useTranslation();
return <div>{t("my-key", "My default value")}</div>;
}
Providing the default English value in the code makes it possible to use it as a fallback value when strings are not yet translated and to extract the strings from the source code to the translations YAML file.
When using plurals, we need to provide default values for the zero
, one
, and other
values, as requested by our translation system. This can be done by passing the default values in the options of the t
function.
t("my-key", {
"defaultValue.zero": "{{count}} items",
"defaultValue.one": "{{count}} item",
"defaultValue.other": "{{count}} items",
count: ...
})
The bin/extract-strings.mjs
script can be used to extract translation strings from the source code and put them in the YAML file that is picked up by our internal translation system. The usage of the script is documented in the script itself.
The script wraps the i18next-parser
tool and converts its output to the YAML format used internally. It is possible to use a similar approach in a custom theme, either using the standard i18next-parser
output as the source for translations or implementing a custom transformer.
Use the bin/update-modules-translations.mjs
to download the latest translations for all the modules. All files are then bundled by the build process in a single [MODULE]-translations-bundle.js
file.
The first time that translations are added to a module, you need to add a mapping between the module folder and the package name on the translations systems to the MODULE
variable in the script. For example, if a module is located in src/modules/my-module
and the package name is cph-theme-my-module
, you need to add:
const MODULES = {
...,
"my-module": "cph-theme-my-module"
}
We use a custom node script that runs lighthouse for automated accessibility testing.
There are two ways of running the script:
- Development mode - it runs the accessibility audits on the local theme preview, on a specific account. It requires
zcli themes:preview
to be running; - CI mode - it runs the accessibility audits on the live theme of a specific account.
Depending on the scope of testing, some manual testing might be needed in addition to the above. Tools like axe DevTools, screen readers e.g. VoiceOver, contrast checkers etc. can assist such testing.
To run the accessibility audits while changing the theme:
- Start compiling and previewing changes like you normally would:
$ yarn install
$ yarn start
-
Create a
.a11yrc.json
file in the root folder (see example);- Specify the account/subdomain to preview the theme making sure it matches the active
zcli
profile - Fill
username
andpassword
with the credentials of an admin user; - Specify which
urls
to test (if left empty, the script will test all urls);
- Specify the account/subdomain to preview the theme making sure it matches the active
-
In a separate console, run the accessibility audits in development mode:
yarn test-a11y -d
A11y audits will then run on the preview started in step 1
.
To run the accessibility audits on the live theme of a specific account, one must:
- Install node modules:
yarn install
- Set
end_user_email
,end_user_password
,subdomain
andurls
as environment variables and run the accessibility audits in CI mode i.e.:
end_user_email=<EMAIL> \
end_user_password=<PASSWORD> \
subdomain=<SUBDOMAIN> \
urls="
https://<SUBDOMAIN>.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/
https://<SUBDOMAIN>.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
https://<SUBDOMAIN>.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests" \
yarn test-a11y
If there is a known accessibility issue that should be ignored or can't be fixed right away, one may add a new entry to the ignore list in the script's configuration object. This will turn the accessibility issue into a warning instead of erroring.
The entry should include:
- the audit id;
- a
path
as a url pattern string; - a
selector
as a string.
For example:
custom: {
ignore: {
tabindex: [
{
path: "*",
selector: "body > a.skip-navigation",
},
],
aria-allowed-attr: [
{
path: "/hc/:locale/profiles/:id",
selector: "body > div.profile-info"
}
]
},
},
In this example, errors for the audit tabindex
with the selector body > a.skip-navigation
will be reported as warnings in all pages (*
). The same will happen for the audit aria-allowed-attr
with the selector body > div.profile-info
, but only for the user profile page /hc/:locale/profiles/:id
.
Please keep in mind that this should only be used when strictly necessarity. Accessibility should be a focus and a priority when making changes to the theme.
Pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/zendesk/copenhagen_theme. Please mention @zendesk/vikings when creating a pull request.
We use conventional commits to improve readability of the project history and to automate the release process. The commit message should therefore respect the following format:
<type>[optional scope]: <description>
[optional body]
[optional footer(s)]
- type: describes the category of the change. See supported types.
- scope: (optional) describes what is affected by the change
- subject: a small description of the change
- body: (optional) additional contextual information about the change
- footer: (optional) adds external links, issue references and other meta-information
i.e.:
chore: automate release
fix(styles): fix button padding
feat(script): add auto focus to fields with errors
We use husky
and commitlint
to validate messages when commiting.
We use Github actions together with semantic-release
to release a new version of the theme once a PR gets merged. On each merge, semantic-release
analyses the commit messages and infers a semantic version bump. It then creates a git tag, updates the manifest version and generates the corresponding changelog.
The list bellow describes the supported commit types and their effect in the release and changelog.
Type | Description | Release | Changelog |
---|---|---|---|
build | Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies | - | - |
chore | Other changes that don't modify the source code | - | - |
ci | Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts | - | - |
docs | Documentation only changes | - | - |
feat | A new feature | minor | Features |
fix | A bug fix | patch | Bug Fixes |
perf | A code change that improves performance | patch | Performance Improvements |
refactor | A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature | - | - |
revert | Reverts a previous commit | patch | Reverts |
style | Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc) | - | - |
test | Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests | - | - |
Commits that add a breaking change should include BREAKING CHANGE
in the body or footer of the commit message.
i.e.:
feat: update theme to use theming api v2
BREAKING CHANGE: theme is now relying on functionality that is exclusive to the theming api v2
This will then generate a major release and add a BREAKING CHANGES
section in the changelog.
Bug reports must be submitted through Zendesk's standard support channels: https://www.zendesk.com/contact/