Zendesk theme development is painful
I have been working with zendesk theme development in the past 2 weeks, with the lack of documentation, the development process is very painful. For work, we are using Enterprise version of zendesk.
login
To start off with, there are multiple login portal in zendesk. Customer service login, dashboard login and theme admin. the place I have to go is
https://yoursite.zendesk.com/theming
Once you login in, you will be able to export your existing theme.
Export theme
The default template we used was Copenhagen and the new design changes I made was based on this theme. So I will need to export this theme as a zip file.
A theme is exported as a zip archive of templates, JavaScript, CSS, and assets. This enables you to work on the theme outside of Guide, using your own development tools.
Exporting your theme is the only way to access the manifest.json file for the theme. The manifest file enables you to customize the theme’s branding settings, including colors, fonts, and images
Running themes locally
this is the most painful part, due to the lack of documentation.
Get WEB API and install ZAP
1. If not already done, enable API access in your Zendesk Support account by going to Admin > Channels > API.
Your Zendesk API Your API KEY
2. Install the Zendesk apps tools (ZAT).
In terminal
sudo gem install rake
gem install zendesk_apps_tools
sudo gem update zendesk_apps_tools
In the exported theme folder. run the following command
zat theme preview
for subdomain, it will be youstite.zendesk.com
yoursite
username
your login email with a "/token" yourloginemail/token
password
the web api key generated previously
then in terminal the local server will run.
to preview https://yoursite.zendesk.com/hc/admin/local_preview/start
If you find my tips are useful, please support my work :)
This is it for now, I spend a lot of time just to get my local server running, I hope this will help you save sometime when you have to do a zendesk theme development.
Tags
Quick Links