Happy new year ahead!
You may be wondering about the title, so here’s some context. Typically there’s the Christmas Carol of the Spirits of Christmas, 3 to be exact: being the ghost of the past, the one of the present and then the future; the story goes something like this… each one takes Scrooge on their journey to show him stuff.
So that gave me the idea to repurpose that frame for a post, AND because I’m off to Japan very very soon for www.JapanDreamin.com and read a book about Yōkai…
For the ones wondering, Yōkai are a class of supernatural monsters, spirits, and demons in Japanese folklore. Each has its own niche and environment of appearance as well as their reason of existence. There are soooooo many, so surely there must be one for the past, present and Future.
The Past
A hidden Gem
As some of you know every day I invest a little time in the Answers section of the community, which is where I got to know about the Salesforce community quite a few years ago and it is really dear to my heart.
One of the things that I see time and time again is some potentially convoluted processing for something that can easily be accomplished by report subscriptions. Check out this post, as simple as it sounds, there may be some bits of functionality you’re not aware of.
It truly is: A Hidden Gem To Trigger Alerts
The Present
All About Flows
Bringing to your attention something that is already available and I find really great: https://unofficialsf.com/flow-resources/
A site created by the Flows Product Team of Salesforce, where you can find all about Lightning flows and more, from tonnes of documentation, videos, ‘how tos’…
It’s a rich and most importantly very useful site, and what’s even better it comes directly from the hands of the makers of Lighting Flows. So do check it out and if you like it and or have ideas to be added there, shout out to the team.
The Future
Communities CMS Components
This one’s a little treat coming up in the next Spring ’20 release, and I came across it recently before I even went through the release notes, so a rather pleasant surprise.
Today in Communities you have the Templates such as the Customer Service template, and more recently Themes were released to give more flexibility over the pages distribution.
But still, if let’s say your page has one right hand pane and a main area; to split the main area in little sections/components you would have to either:
- go creative with rich text area, or
- write up a responsive html, or
- LWC
Having a play around with the above I found in my sandbox a component called CMS collection. And I saw that I could define how many rows and columns of records it would display and that I could map it to fields of an object in Salesforce.
To do that I only needed to create an object with fields I wanted to use, so let’s say; a header, sub-header, image and redirect (as I didn’t want to give access to the object records but to whichever link I wanted even external when the users clicked on it) & a list view.
Then within communities Content Management create a CMS Collection from the Salesforce object and select which list view to use which will drive the records and fields to display.
Lastly add and map the info in your community component:
Tada!
And that’s not it, you can have carousel type, slideshow and many other options, which gives a new layer of extraction. So you can give access to Marketing or Content Management or Operations teams to the records in Salesforce, so they can update the information on the fly!
Why not think of a trillion uses for it like; product info, service updates, or news, or anything really. Even have variations with Audiences which is functionality you already have available!
That’s it for now! I hope you found it useful & またね (mata ne)!
Nicely explained. Really liked the language of the content.