Communities Documentation

So, after a frustrating 19 day Premier Support Case when I was Setting up Knowledge on Communities only to find out it was on a Summer '16 release note, I thought what am I doing wrong, how did I not see this in the documentation (and yes, I did look back through the docco before I submitted the case. So I asked Salesforce Docs on Twitter.  Wow, so it is documented. Why did I not find that? Why, even when I knew the answer, could I not find anything other than the Release Note and a Knowledge Article (which I would not have found as I was not searching the exact keywords). This is my post trying to find out why. 

So, the document that I was working on to do this project, and reported to Salesforce Docs that it did not have any links back to the document they pointed to, is now removed. Ooh but here is a link that works https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/204/latest/en-us/sfdc/pdf/salesforce_communities_implementation.pdf. This document was a Winter '17 document (so current as of now), and it was what looks like to me a full and comprehensive guide to how to set up Communities. It is also based on the Developer Documentation - Getting Started with Communities. When you have to go through ALL the steps, I do find using a PDF is easier. Note: There still is a download PDF of this content button on this page. Looks like the docs team is scrambling to fix this issue. 

Now look at the Dev Documentation site. 

Searching the Getting Started with Communities developer site for "Guest Access to the Support API" - the exact setting that needs to be enabled to make Guest Support function returns no results in the Developer documentation. What? a setting about the "Support API" returns zero results in Salesforce Developer Documentation? That's because Support API is not a thing, and this function looks like it has been hurriedly hacked together for some security issue and slipped into a release. (You can tell this because this field is ONLY available on the Edit page of the Site Details page - it's not on the View page of Site Details and it's NOT in Community Management settings. This is just BAD Salesforce UI. But I digress, let's get back to Documentation. 

Searching through the whole of the Dev site for the setting does turn up some interesting topics. Yeah, nah, I would not have been searching through Service SDK for iOS docs. Geez the iOS people get ALL the info - this setting is mentioned THREE times in the iOS SDK docs, but NO WHERE in the developer Communities docs or Knowledge docs or Sites docs - where you would expect it. Really? And how come, unlike searching in Success, Knowledge Articles do NOT get searched when doing an EVERYWHERE search query. WHY OH WHY are Developer docs different to Salesforce Docs? 

So what if I try to go to the top menu in developer docs and drill down. Well Communities and Knowledge are NOT topics in the list. Whereas Salesforce Docs now has thousands of topics in their nav, Developer has about 10. Let's try Service Cloud (again, I'm NOT setting up Service Cloud, this is an NFP org who has paid for Knowledge and Communities - they don't have Service Cloud). Not anything about communities there. So how would I even navigate to the Communities documentation listed above - no idea. If enter the keyword of Communities I get that Getting Started with Communities. So that's it. Developers get no knowledge of how to set up support on communities correctly. This feature is NOT about just Napli, it is a Sites stetting so it's NOT about a templated community only. 

Aha! finally a breadcrumb! I searched for Support within the Getting Started with Communities and find Using Community Builder with Templates. At first I clicked on Enable Additional Features in the hierarchy which is where I would expect anything about the Contact Support button to be, because it is right next to the Ask a Question button in the community builder, which is mentioned in that section. I'm not going to think that I have to look at a special guide for templated communities to find out how to do support. When I got really stuck I expected the answer to be in "Enable Public Access to a Community" because that is what I was trying to do - get unauthenticated users to submit support cases. Why isn't there a link to "Now to do the rest of the stuff you need to do go to the templated communities documentation". 

I knew about Lightning Bolt and that the Napili community set up is now done through Lightning Bolt, but what I did not know is that they nave now separated their documentation out into setting up "templated communities" - eg communities using Napili, Koa or Kokua and general communities stuff that has not much info. 

OK, so moving on. 

Let's try finding this gem of a piece of information using Salesforce docs site.

From the home page, I go to Set Up and Maintain Communities, which takes to you Salesforce Communities Overview. 

Enable Salesforce Communities which is where you think you would start, mentions nothing about templates. If the branch between setting up a templated community and setting up a tabbed based community is so important - why not mention it here. See I should not be able to get to Brand Your Community unless I know if I'm doing templates or tabs. Here it refers to templated communities as Community Builder-based communities. 

Same documentation here as what's in developer docs really, just differently formatted. Enable Public Access to a Community doesn't mention support at all. 

Again, like the dev docs, they get down to Activate your Community and Change your Community Template before you've even got anywhere near Community Templates. 

In Docs, different to Dev docs, under Use Other Features In Your Community which has the same topics as Enable Additional Features in Dev Docs, it actually mentions Cases. Support docs are one up on Dev docs here then. 

Nothing in Enable Cases for Communities Users mentions guest users, it only mentions External Users (I assume this means Authenticated Users). This page needs to say, "both External Users and Guest Users can created cases... here's how".

Enable Salesforce Knowledge in your Community also mentions nothing about that Knowledge can be public, or only accessible to Authenticated Users.

So finally we get to Community Templates. 

I would not have gone here because I KNOW I can only use Napili for Knowledge and Cases - it's the only way to do it. 

Now we get to the Napili checklist. It mentions Web-to-Case. It mentions profiles and permission sets. It mentions configure the guest user profile. It mentions give read and create permission for the case object. It mentions all the stuff about topics and data categories - important. 

Set up Web-to-Case mentions nothing about all the steps around Global Actions.