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Reality of code-free Salesforce communities – Unfolded truth About the code free salesforce communities

By Rachel Taylor
17 December 2018

Salesforce introduced to help businesses in collaborating with different roles and introduced Salesforce Communities and this is useful to customers, employees to partners, vendors, and resellers. Thus, the Communities replaced the old portals of the Salesforce and gave businesses more options of customization.

Creating a brand style that is consistent across the touch points is important to establish credibility and trust. This is the reason many companies customize their (UX) user experience of their Salesforce Communities.

The advantage is that with Salesforce, you can easily customize any Community and this can be done by writing custom Visualforce code. Nevertheless, the time commitment and cost for the custom code is done outside the firm or as in-house leading several companies to go for code-free salesforce communities.

There are three options to modify your community without code such as:

Within standard Salesforce basic customizations
Skuid
Community Builder Templates

Each option provides advantages for different cases and its use.

Basic customizations

The most straight-forward option is the customizing your Community and this is found inside Salesforce. These options of basic customization let you set the color scheme, footer, and header. However, your Community needs the user experience of standard Salesforce.

This is a good option only when:

You like the appearance of the user experience of the standard Salesforce
You dislike displaying different information to varying user profiles such as employees, partners, etc.
You are not interested to change the fonts in your community
You dislike making styling or any other additional branding or customizations

Skuid for Salesforce

There are tools to create a Salesforce community matching your business needs and can be done as code-free salesforce communities. With a mouse click, you can develop your own theme design matching the brand standards of your company and also the public-facing websites.

You can customize your Community pages layout. With Skuid, customers can make changes fast and also show the stakeholders the Community vision.

Skuid is right if you have:

To make to your page layouts advanced customizations
To highly customize styling and branding
to serve different users based on data-driven content
To simplify data entry or create data visualizations without code
Business users can make changes without IT resources to your Community

Community builder templates

The next code-free way to customize your Salesforce Community is by using Community Builder Templates. Available in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions of Salesforce, the Community Builder takes you one step closer to your custom-branded community.

Having Community Builder Templates implies you can:

Build easily a community that is mobile-optimized
Apply to your community a color scheme
Change the page background and header color
Customize the font size, font family, and also the font color

Currently, however, the Community Builder Templates have a few technical limitations, and this also includes the lack of support for:

Article smart links
Lightning Experience
Existing communities that were not available during the preconfigured templates
Form and Data components from site.com
Lookup fields
Login options for Multilingual community

All said and done, the Community Builder Templates are the best option if:

You wish to have more control than the permitted basic customizations
You are developing a new community without editing the existing community
The availability of font options to fulfill your needs within the Community Builder
Your community requires to support only one language
Your community need not consider using the lookup fields

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Reality of code-free Salesforce communities – Unfolded truth About the code free salesforce communities

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Rachel Taylor

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