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So yeah, you are going to say "why didn't you read the release notes first Jodie!???" Yeah, well in hindsight I should have. BUT, as there is NO WAY to create a Multi-Branded PKB using Salesforce Knowledge, without significant custom code, I just hoped that communities would be the answer.
Smart Links
(Sorry, the community in this example is not working right now. I will have to get it up and running again in my spare time. Lolz, what even is spare time).
So here is the problem.
Here is my community https://jodiem-developer-edition.na12.force.com/branda/s/
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- Click on the link on the article. But wait - first, ask yourself, where do you expect it to go?
- Of course you expect it to go to the article page within the community, don't you?
- No, of course it's not that easy or I would not be writing this article.
- It goes to here https://jodiem-developer-edition.na12.force.com/branda/articles/Knowledge/Brand-A-Keyword-1
- This is a non-branded site with a 3 generation old force.com logo.
- Yes, you can brand it, but that's not the point.
- This is a non-branded site with a 3 generation old force.com logo.
- It should go to here https://jodiem-developer-edition.na12.force.com/branda/s/article/Brand-A-Keyword-1 - the article within my community.
- The kitten is from PlaceKitten if you are interested
Having this bug in the community templates means that I would have to either.
- Have no linked knowledge articles at all - this is how https://go.eway.iohave gotten around this issue
- If I maintain the two PKB apps for Brand A and Brand B, it means I would have to replicate ALL The content in my knowledge articles to create completely new knowledge articles for Brand C then ensure there are no Smart Links used.
- If I go to three (or more - we are planning more) branded customer communities using the community templates, which is the goal and why we first created this first community as a testing ground rather than using the awful PKB3 app again, we would have to replicate EVERY ARTICLE THREE TIMES and ensure there are no smart links used. And of course you can't just clone articles, you have to copy and paste into a new article.
- Create 301 redirects on EVERY article manually so that they redirect back to the community. (That's what I did).
This can NOT be the answer. The whole idea of Knowledge, and Smart Links is that you can use one article for various channels and various customer or partner communities - and the branding on the community is just picked up from that community, or the language of the article is just picked up by the language the reader has selected.
The whole idea of a community site is that you can keep people on your community site and have them Contact Support if they can't find what they are looking for in the PKB and the contact support page handles deflection to other articles.
Why would a company trying to produce enterprise level software and really push communities as the future of the way things are done, have such a glaring bug that means you have to duplicate content multiple times. That is just such the antithesis of what Salesforce is about.
This idea and this idea both seem to suggest that Salesforce Support say it is a feature and by design!!!!! It can NOT be a feature, this can NOT have been thought about and the answer be that it is the way it is meant to work!!! it is a BUG - pure and simple - a BUG.
This is so disappointing that this bug exists when it seems to be such a simple fix.
The only way to work around it is to do manual 301's for each and every article that is linked from a SmartLink.
Multi-language
OMG, Multilingual Public Knowledge bases now seem to work!
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