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:

Manifest file
Set of templates
Stylesheet and JavaScript files
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 ZCLI. For details, read the zcli themes documentation.

Customizing your theme

Once you have forked this repository you can feel free to edit templates, CSS, 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.

Stylesheet and JavaScript

We use Rollup to compile the JS and CSS files that are used in the theme - style.css and script.js. Do not edit these directly as they'll be regenerated during release.

To get started:

$ yarn install
$ yarn start

This will compile all the source code in src and styles and watch for changes. It will also start preview.

Notes:

We intentionally do not use babel when compiling script.js so we can get a clean bundle output. Make sure to only use widely supported ecmascript features (ES2015).
Do not edit style.css, script.js and the files inside the assets folder directly. They are regenerated during release.
Preview requires login so make sure to first run yarn zcli login -i if you haven't done that before.

Assets

The Copenhagen theme comes with a few JavaScript assets, but you can add other assets to your theme by placing them in the assets folder.

React components

From version 4.0.0, the Copenhagen theme uses some React components to render parts of the UI. These components are located in the src/modules folder and are built using the Zendesk Garden component library.

These components are bundled as native JavaScript modules as part of the Rollup build process, and they are emitted as JS files in the assets folder. Since assets are renamed when a theme is installed, the modules needs to be imported using the asset helper.

To make the process of importing the modules easier, we added a Rollup plugin that generates an import map that maps the module name to the asset URL. This import map is then injected into the document_head.hbs template during the build.

For example, if you defined a module named my-module in the src/modules/my-module folder, you can add it to the rollup.config.mjs file like this:

export default defineConfig([
  // ...
  // Configuration for bundling modules in the src/modules directory
  {
    // ...
    input: {
      "my-module": "src/modules/my-module/index.js",
    },
    // ...
  }
]);

Rollup will generate a file named my-module-bundle.js in the assets folder and this import map will be added to the document_head.hbs template:

<script type="importmap">
{
  "imports": {
    "my-module": "{{asset 'my-module-bundle.js'}}",
  }
}
</script>

You can then import the module in your templates like this:

<script type="module">
  import { something } from "my-module";

  // ...
</script>

Internationalization

I18n is implemented in the React components using the react-i18next library. We use a flat JSON file and we use . as a separator for plurals, which is different from the default _ and it is configured during initialization.

We also added some tools to be able to integrate the library with the internal translation system used at Zendesk. If you are building a custom theme and you want to provide your own translations you can refer to the library documentation to setup the loading of your translations.

Integration with the Zendesk translation system

Adding translations strings

Translation strings are added directly in the source code, usually using the useTranslation hook, passing the key and the default English value:

import { useTranslation } from 'react-i18next';

function MyComponent() {
  const { t } = useTranslation();

  return <div>{t("my-key", "My default value")}</div>
}

Providing the default English value in the code makes it possible to use it as a fallback value when strings are not yet translated and to extract the strings from the source code to the translations YAML file.

Plurals

When using plurals, we need to provide default values for the zero, one, and other values, as requested by our translation system. This can be done by passing the default values in the options of the t function.

t("my-key", {
  "defaultValue.zero": "{{count}} items",
  "defaultValue.one": "{{count}} item",
  "defaultValue.other": "{{count}} items",
  count: ...
})

String extraction

The bin/extract-strings.mjs script can be used to extract translation strings from the source code and put them in the YAML file that is picked up by our internal translation system. The usage of the script is documented in the script itself.

The script wraps the i18next-parser tool and converts its output to the YAML format used internally. It is possible to use a similar approach in a custom theme, either using the standard i18next-parser output as the source for translations or implementing a custom transformer.

Updating translation files

Use the bin/update-modules-translations.mjs to download the latest translations for all the modules. All files are then bundled by the build process in a single [MODULE]-translations-bundle.js file.

The first time that translations are added to a module, you need to add a mapping between the module folder and the package name on the translations systems to the MODULE variable in the script. For example, if a module is located in src/modules/my-module and the package name is cph-theme-my-module, you need to add:

const MODULES = {
  ...,
  "my-module": "cph-theme-my-module"
}

Accessibility testing

We use a custom node script that runs lighthouse for automated accessibility testing.

There are two ways of running the script:

Development mode - it runs the accessibility audits on the local theme preview, on a specific account. It requires zcli themes:preview to be running;
CI mode - it runs the accessibility audits on the live theme of a specific account.

Depending on the scope of testing, some manual testing might be needed in addition to the above. Tools like axe DevTools, screen readers e.g. VoiceOver, contrast checkers etc. can assist such testing.

Development mode

To run the accessibility audits while changing the theme:

Start compiling and previewing changes like you normally would:

$ yarn install
$ yarn start

Create a .a11yrc.json file in the root folder (see example);
1. Specify the account/subdomain to preview the theme making sure it matches the active zcli profile
2. Fill username and password with the credentials of an admin user;
3. Specify which urls to test (if left empty, the script will test all urls);
In a separate console, run the accessibility audits in development mode:

yarn test-a11y -d

A11y audits will then run on the preview started in step 1.

CI mode

To run the accessibility audits on the live theme of a specific account, one must:

Install node modules:

yarn install

Set end_user_email, end_user_password, subdomain and urls as environment variables and run the accessibility audits in CI mode i.e.:

end_user_email=<EMAIL> \
end_user_password=<PASSWORD> \
subdomain=<SUBDOMAIN> \
urls="
    https://<SUBDOMAIN>.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/
    https://<SUBDOMAIN>.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
    https://<SUBDOMAIN>.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests" \
yarn test-a11y

Ignore list

If there is a known accessibility issue that should be ignored or can't be fixed right away, one may add a new entry to the ignore list in the script's configuration object. This will turn the accessibility issue into a warning instead of erroring.

The entry should include:

the audit id;
a path as a url pattern string;
a selector as a string.

For example:

  custom: {
    ignore: {
      tabindex: [
        {
          path: "*",
          selector: "body > a.skip-navigation",
        },
      ],
      aria-allowed-attr: [
        {
          path: "/hc/:locale/profiles/:id",
          selector: "body > div.profile-info"
        }
      ]
    },
  },

In this example, errors for the audit tabindex with the selector body > a.skip-navigation will be reported as warnings in all pages (*). The same will happen for the audit aria-allowed-attr with the selector body > div.profile-info, but only for the user profile page /hc/:locale/profiles/:id.

Please keep in mind that this should only be used when strictly necessarity. Accessibility should be a focus and a priority when making changes to the theme.

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.

i.e.:

feat: update theme to use theming api v2

BREAKING CHANGE: theme is now relying on functionality that is exclusive to the theming api v2

This will then generate a major release and add a BREAKING CHANGES section in the changelog.

Bug reports

Bug reports must be submitted through Zendesk's standard support channels: https://www.zendesk.com/contact/