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. This document was a Winter '17 document (so current as of now), and it was what looked like to me a full and comprehensive guide to how to set up Communities. Here is a copy of an older version that I had also referenced when doing my first Community (but it's pretty old, so won't help us to find that this issue is not documented there - but you can see it's a pretty comprehensive guide to getting started with creating 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. 

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. 

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 communties" - eg communities using Napili, Koa or Kokua and general communties 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.