Salesforce Communities

Salesforce communities are out-of-the-box, branded pages which can be used to allow employees, customers, and partners to connect.

Some common Salesforce community examples include:

  • Giving customers access to a knowledge base, service agents, and other knowledgeable customers who can solve issues.
  • Collaborating on opportunities and deals.
  • Providing an HR space for employees to complete their onboarding, learn about benefits, and resolve other issues.

Using Skuid, you can dramatically enhance the user experience for your communities. While the process is very similar to overriding your Salesforce UI, there are some differences covered below.

Prerequisites

Understand communities

While some basic settings will be reviewed here, this topic assumes familiarity with Salesforce communities.

The Salesforce Communities Overview is recommended reading before proceeding, but you should at least be familiar with the process of enabling and creating communities, as well as managing them and building within them—whether that be the through the Community Workspaces interface or the Community Management interface.

Design with Skuid

This topic assumes you have already designed and created Skuid pages for your community UI. If not, review Skuid’s topics on connecting to data and assembling pages with components.

Override Lightning-based Community Templates

Like other Lighting deployment options, Skuid can be used to enhance Salesforce Communities that utilize Lightning-based community templates through pages constructed in the Community Builder.

Warning

Skuid pages currently cannot be deployed within Lightning-based community templates using the Skuid Page Lightning component or custom Lightning components.

Use the Visualforce Page Lightning component

It is also possible to insert Skuid pages into Lightning communities using the Visualforce Page Lightning component.

Follow the instructions listed here, working in the Community Builder instead of the Lightning App Builder.

Note

Skuid pages will not preview within the Visualforce Page component in the Community Builder, but they will display properly at the community’s URL when published.

Override the Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce Pages Template

Overriding your community’s UI is very similar to overriding other pages in Salesforce with Skuid, with some community-specific steps.

Create a Visualforce page that uses the skuid:page Visualforce component.

A direct parallel to other Salesforce pages is using a Visualforce page as a means to override the Salesforce UI. For communities in particular, you’ll need deploy your Skuid page using the skuid:page Visualforce component method.

If you haven’t used this override method before, know that it requires some preparation and specific Visualforce markup. Follow the steps listed in the skuid:page component topic.

After completing the prerequisite steps, model your Visualforce markup after the markup samples in the Object/Controller-independent pages section.

Warning

Setting showHeader and sidebar to false will prevent the Salesforce header from being displayed. for more info, read the skuid:page component topic.

With Visualforce markup prepared, let’s create a basic example to illustrate how your Visualforce page should look:

  1. First, create your community’s home page.
  2. In the Salesforce sidebar, navigate to Build > Develop > Visualforce Pages.
  3. Click New.
  4. Fill out the Label field with a recognizable name—for example SkuidCommunityHome—which will autopopulate the Name field.
  5. Paste the appropriate markup in the Visualforce Markup pane.
  6. Click Save.

Configure your community’s tabs to include the Skuid page Visualforce tab

With a Visualforce page created, you’ll additionally need to also create a Visualforce tab that references the Visualforce page. You’ll use this tab later when configuring the structure of the community.

  1. In the Salesforce sidebar, navigate to Create > Tabs.
  2. Under Visualforce tabs, click New.
  3. Complete the fields:
    • Visualforce Page: Select the Visualforce page created in the previous section.
    • Tab Label: Enter a recognizable name that
    • Name: Autopopulated by the Tab Label.
    • Tab Style: Select a style appropriate for your community.
    • Description: (Optional) Enter a description for this community home page.
  4. Click Next.
  5. Choose which profiles can view the Visualforce tab.
  6. Click Next.
  7. (Optional) Select which apps to add the tab to.
  8. Click Save.

Configure the Salesforce community home page to default to the Visualforce Page.

Because the community uses Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce for its template—and your community will typically only have the Chatter tab by default—you’ll need to add the Visualforce tab for your Skuid page manually.

To do so, follow the steps listed in Salesforce’s Use a Custom Community Home Page documentation

Allow community users to access Skuid

Note

If you have not yet done so, you will need to purchase subscriptions to match the number of community users accessing your Skuid page on the community. For more information, contact a Skuid sales rep regarding subscriptions.

Note

Within the Salesforce universe, the term “Skuid license” refers to a user’s ability to interact with Skuid. While the Skuid UI reflects this terminology to avoid confusion, the “number of Skuid licenses” you have refers to purchased Skuid subscriptions.

When you are adding members to your community, keep in mind that each user who will be accessing your Skuid page—whether they are an internal and external user—will need the appropriate Skuid license and permission set.

  • For all users who will access Skuid in any way, assign them a Skuid license.
  • For any users that will be viewing the community, assign them the Skuid Page Viewer permission set.

To make managing your community users as simple as possible, we recommend using Skuid’s automatic license and permission assignment capability within Configure > User Licensing / Permissions. Your Skuid settings can be configured to automatically add both a Skuid license and the Skuid Page Viewer permission set to any new community profile user. These settings can also be configured so that licenses are removed automatically as users become inactive, helping manage Skuid license numbers.

Note

Many communities automate user creation and connection to a Salesforce contact using Apex triggers. If this is the case in your org, you may have issues with automatic license and permission set assignments, as Salesforce does not allow modification to setup and CRM objects in the same transaction. If you are having issues, see this section of the Skuid assignment topic.

Troubleshooting

Salesforce community errors are often related to permissions. If you or your users are seeing unexpected behaviors, try some of the following troubleshooting steps:

  • Ensure that any affected community users or community user profiles have the appropriate permissions to access the Skuid pages used in the community. This includes verifying record-level access to any necessary Skuid pages and sometimes assigning field-level permissions appropriate for those Skuid pages. You may also consider changing the organization-wide sharing defaults for the Page and Page Assignment objects to Public instead of Private.

    Note

    New to working with permissions? It’s never a bad idea to review the general concepts behind Salesforce record security.

  • When using page assignments, check that any assigned pages are properly selected and still exist. If Skuid cannot find a page for a user’s page assignment—either because the page name is entered incorrectly or the page no longer exists—errors can occur.

  • Users may receive an “Insufficient Privileges” error because their login session has timed out. Encourage users to verify that they are logged in.