Custom Content

What is Custom Content?

Custom Content is our feature that lets you create and organize Pages of content. This content will eventually take on many forms but for now, our first layout we’ve titled the “KB Layout”. We designed this layout to work well for a Knowledge Base or Resource section, but it can be used for any type of content you’d like! There are three important concepts to keep track of: 

• Content Sections - These are the menu items you will see in the top nav, next to Challenges, Rewards etc. You can create as many of these as you like.
• Categories - These are subsets or collections of content that exist inside of a Section.
• Pages - These are the individual posts or written pieces stored inside Categories. That means what you are currently reading is a Page!

We hope you enjoy the content and as always, we want your feedback so feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to your CSM or post an idea in our Product Ideas Forum.

What is a Section?

Content Section is an area in your hub dedicated to storing content on a topic of interest to your members. The section will be visible to any members targeted to them in the main navigation. You can also set a custom content section to be Public, which means anyone in the internet can search and access the content.

Creating a New Section

To create a new  Content Section, open the navigation item called “Content” as an Admin > + New Content Section.

Each section will have the following inputs:

Targeting

After the basic details are completed, you can target your section the same way as other content in the hub if you choose to Target Audience = Private. For example, you can target a section for Internal Documents to Employees only, or a section reserved for Content visible to customers of a certain product.

There is also an option to make the Content set to Public. This means that any content made public will be searchable on and accessible from search engines. Additionally, any user who obtains a link to the customer’s AdvocateHub will also see the publicly available Discussions Categories. Non-members will have read-only access, however, they must sign up to participate. More on Public Discussions can be found in the following article: Public Content and Discussions.

Managing your Content Section

Once your section is complete you will see the details in the Overview

From here you can:

1. Edit the metadata or targeting information
2. Add a Category
3. Manage your Pages

What is a Category?

A  Category is used to organize pages within your Content Section. Categories are selected when creating pages and are displayed in the lefthand sidebar for members to browse through.

Creating a Category

Head to the Administration area, choose a content section, and click the Create Category button.

Each category will have the following inputs:

What is a Page?

A page contains the content you are writing and belongs to a category.

Creating Pages

To create a page, navigate to the advocate side, then to the content section you want to create the page in. You will see a button to create a new page that will pop-up the page-editor

Once you’ve set a name, a category, and written some content you can create your content page.

Finding Pages

Your end users can find pages in a few ways:

1. Navigating to the Content Section and browsing the categories
2. Searching from anywhere in your Hub
3. Directly via a link

Managing Pages

Click the Wrench icon on a page to bring up administrative actions:

• Delete a page entirely (No Undo!)
• Disable and Hide replies on this page
• Pin the page to the top of the category
• Archive the page, which locks down further edits, replies, polls etc.
• Hide the page from appearing in the lists or in search

Basic Formatting

Formatting Bar

You can see the formatting options available to you in this bar.

Let’s walk through a few examples.

Quotes and Code Blocks

Block Quote can be used to display a highlighted message like this:

Code Blocks let you display a message in a pre-formatted container

Headers

To create headers, use hashtags (#) at the start of the line, corresponding to header level. For example, an h1 heading would have one hashtag, while an h3 heading would have three, as shown here:

### This will create an h3 heading

Alternatively, you can add headers within html blocks like this:

<h3>I am a header, size 3</h3>

h2 Heading

h3 Heading

h4 Heading

h5 Heading

Images

You can upload an image by clicking on the upload icon in the formatting bar. You can adjust the zie of the image by hover over the bottom left corner.

Videos

To use a youtube or other embedded video link, click upload file then choose the ‘From the Web’ option. The maximum video file size is 100mb.

Files

Files can be uploaded from within the editor. The maximum file size is 100mb.The filetypes supported include:

Presentations

.key .odp .pps .ppt .pptx

Excel

.xls .xlsx .ods .xlr

Docs

.doc .docx .odt .pdf .rtf .tex .txt .wks .wps .wpd

Video

.avi .m4v .mkv .mov .mp4 .mpg .mpeg .wmv

Images

.jpg .jpeg .png .gif

Admin Only

.zip

Files appear with a download icon and a name which can be changed.

Advanced Formatting

There are some advanced formatting options you can use to give your pages some extra flair.

Details Dropdown

In the settings option of the formatting bar, you’ll see an option called ‘Hide Details’.

This is useful for hiding collapsable content within your pages. This is useful for an FAQ or Quiz, or just for hiding more optional content under a heading.

Using HTML

Pages support many different forms of basic HTML elements like tables, horizontal rules, headings, divs, and more.

Links

The links created with the editor open in the same tab. If you want links to open in a new tab, you can use HTML links as shown below. The  target="_blank" part is what makes it open in a new tab.

This:

<a href="https://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google</a>

…gives you this: Google

Links to Headings

You can link to other headings within your page or to another page using the following method.

Start by using the  <h1> HTML tag for your headings and assign an id value prefixed with heading-- as shown below

<h1 id="heading--heading1">

Make sure the part after the prefix is unique so your headers don’t get mixed up.

Now to create your link use the following format

[Go to the top of the Page](#heading--heading1)

which will display like this and should actually take you to the top of the page.
Go to the top of the Page

You can also link to another Page’s Heading like so

[link text](/topicpath/#heading--headingID)

The topic path is found after the  /forum/ part of the URL of the page you are linking to, as seen highlighted below:

Table of Contents

Using the Method above, we can create a Table of Contents by linking to each heading like so

1. Dropdowns
2. Links
3. Links to Headings
4. Table of Contents
5. Tables
6. Polls

Tables

It’s easy to make a table on this webpage and use the generated HTML: https://divtable.com/generator/. An example is below.

You can make elements in the table bold by wrapping them in  <b> </b> tags or italicized by using <i> </i> tags.

Polls

Just like in Discussion, you can add polls to your content to gauge your readers or to simulate a quiz. It's also useful for getting feedback on the page they are reading.