Copenhagen Theme by Zendesk

The Copenhagen theme is the default Zendesk Guide theme. It is designed to be responsive and accessible. Learn more about customizing Zendesk Guide here.

The Copenhagen theme for Help Center consists of a set of templates, styles, a Javascript file used mainly for interactions and an assets folder.

How to use

This is the latest version of the Copenhagen theme available for Guide. It is possible to use this repository as a starting point to build your own custom theme. You can fork this repository as you see fit. You can use your favorite IDE to develop themes and preview your changes locally in a web browser using the Zendesk Apps Tools (ZAT). For details, see Previewing theme changes locally.

Customizing your theme

Once you have forked this repository you can feel free to edit templates, CSS in style.css (if you would like to use SASS go to the Using SASS section), javascript and manage assets.

Manifest file

The manifest allows you to define a group of settings for your theme that can then be changed via the UI in Theming Center. You can read more about the manifest file here.

Settings folder

If you have a variable of type file, you need to provide a default file for that variable in the /settings folder. This file will be used on the settings panel by default and users can upload a different file if they like. Ex. If you would like to have a variable for the background image of a section, the variable in your manifest file would look something like this:

{
  ...
  "settings": [{
    "label": "Images",
    "variables": [{
      "identifier": "background_image",
      "type": "file",
      "description": "Background image for X section",
      "label": "Background image",
    }]
  }]
}

And this would look for a file inside the settings folder named: background_image

Adding assets

You can add assets to the asset folder and use them in your CSS, Javascript and templates. You can read more about assets here

Publishing your theme

After you have customized your theme you can download the repository as a zip file and import it into Theming Center.

You can follow the documentation for importing here.

You can also import directly from GitHub - learn more here.

Templates

The theme includes all the templates that are used for a Help Center that has all the features available. List of templates in the theme:

Article page
Category page
Community post list page
Community post page
Community topic list page
Community topic page
Contributions page
Document head
Error page
Footer
Header
Home page
New community post page
New request page
Requests page
Search results page
Section page
Subscriptions page
User profile page

You can add up to 10 optional templates for:

Article page
Category page
Section page

You do this by creating files under the folders templates/article_pages, templates/category_pages or templates/section_pages. Learn more here.

Styles

The styles that Theming Center needs to use in the theme are in the style.css file in the root folder.

The styles for the theme are split using Sass partials, all the partials are under styles/, they are all included in the "main" file index.scss and then compiled to CSS. If you wish to use SASS you can go to the using SASS section

Assets

The Copenhagen theme doesn't have any assets, but you can add assets to your theme by placing them in the assets folder.

Using SASS

In order to use SASS for development, you just need to compile it into the CSS that Zendesk Guide understands. Note: Zendesk App Tools theme preview currently does not support live SASS compilation.

Requirements

Install Ruby, we use sassc gem to compile our .scss files. You can see how to install Ruby here.
Install sassc gem. You can run:

    gem install sassc:1.12.1

Now you can compile your SASS files running:

./bin/compile.rb

Which will take all the scss files inside the styles/ folder and create the style.css file that is consumable by Zendesk Guide.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/zendesk/copenhagen_theme. Please mention @zendesk/vikings when creating a pull request.

We use conventional commits to improve readability of the project history and to automate the release process. The commit message should therefore respect the following format:

<type>[optional scope]: <description>

[optional body]

[optional footer(s)]

type: describes the category of the change. See supported types.
scope: (optional) describes what is affected by the change
subject: a small description of the change
body: (optional) additional contextual information about the change
footer: (optional) adds external links, issue references and other meta-information

i.e.:

chore: automate release
fix(styles): fix button padding
feat(script): add auto focus to fields with errors

We use husky and commitlint to validate messages when commiting.

We use Github actions together with semantic-release to release a new version of the theme once a PR gets merged. On each merge, semantic-release analyses the commit messages and infers a semantic version bump. It then creates a git tag, updates the manifest version and generates the corresponding changelog.

Commit types

The list bellow describes the supported commit types and their effect in the release and changelog.

Type	Description	Release	Changelog
build	Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies	-	-
chore	Other changes that don't modify the source code	-	-
ci	Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts	-	-
docs	Documentation only changes	-	-
feat	A new feature	minor	Features
fix	A bug fix	patch	Bug Fixes
perf	A code change that improves performance	patch	Performance Improvements
refactor	A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature	-	-
revert	Reverts a previous commit	patch	Reverts
style	Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc)	-	-
test	Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests	-	-

Breaking changes

Commits that add a breaking change should include BREAKING CHANGE in the body or footer of the commit message.