Basics of Experience Cloud

 Salesforce Community Templates :

A Salesforce community template is essentially a starting point for a new community.

Standard templates are provided by Salesforce, and custom templates are available from partners.

four main elements in a community template:

1.Theme

2.Pages

3.Components

4.configuration

There's a theme, which provides the overall look and feel, the pages, the components that can go on those pages or are simply available for use, and finally, the configuration of those components that are on the pages.

Fundamental Elements of Community :

1.settings : Overall and Community-specific

2.Sharing & Visibility : Community data access

3.Topics & Chatter : Organized Collaboration

4.Knowledge : Curated articles for a Community

5.Personalization : Audience targeting specific items

6.CMS Content : News,images , documents etc.

some key org settings that impact communities:

These are located in various places within Setup. Some noteworthy settings include Chatter, Feed Tracking, Topics for Objects, and Knowledge.

 

Key Communities Settings:

Communities settings are available after initially enabling communities overall.

- Community Domain(required)

This sets the base domain for all of the communities in your org. 

It can be overwritten with a custom domain, but this is the standard approach for setting your community domain.

-Enable ExperienceBundle Metadata API

This allows you to take advantage of a text‑base representation of different settings in your community, such as pages, branding sets, and themes.

-Enable Partner Super User Access

which is very useful if you want to grant one or multiple users additional access in your org. This allows these users to access more data and records, regardless of sharing rules and organization‑wide defaults.

-Allow using standard external profiles for self‑registration and user creation.

-Enable Account Relationships

which allows sharing between partner accounts.

Community-specific settings :

-main settings

which control the name and URL of the domain

-Preferences

-Members & Contributors

-Login & REgistration

-Emails

-Pages

Sharing & Visibility :

Data security must be considered a top priority within any community.

Community Data Security Elements 

1.Object & Field Access

2.Organization-wide Defaults Sharing

3.Record Sharing

4.Sharing Sets

5.Share Groups

6.Account Relationships

Community Membership

can you access the community?

Object Permissions

Can you access the object?

Field Permissions

Can you access the fields?

Sharing/Visibility

Can you access specific records of this object?

Object and Field Access :

Access is granted to users through profiles or permission sets.

Organization-wide Default Sharing Settings :

Organization-wide default(OWD) sharing determines record visibility,by default.

Four primary settings for OWD sharing are 

- Private

- public Read only

- Public Read/Write

- Controlled by parent

Internal and external defaults can differ, eternal cannot be more open than internal.

Record Sharing :

Builds on OWD sharing settings

Granular record sharing can be facilitated in various ways:

- Manual

- sharing rules

- Apex sharing

Record sharing can only be applied to external users with specific licenses:

-partner Community

- customer community plus

Sharing Sets :

Sharing Sets are Unique to communities.

Can be used for sharing with users of any external license type (Partner/customer)

Applicable to objects with an OWD sharing setting of Private or Public Read Only.

Logic requires either a contact or account lookup on shared item and user sharee.

Sharing Sets are not community-specific,but instead map to profiles.

Share Groups :

Share Groups share the data of HVP users whose profile is included in a Sharing Set.

The objects configured in the Sharing Set are ignored;all shared records are affected.

The users with whom data is shared can be identified by user,role or group.

The user with whom data is shared can be internal or partner users.

Account Relationship Sharing :

Allows for relationship-based sharing in a multi-level community.

Enables data associated with a "sub-partner" to be shared with a partner.

Streamlines the management of data visibility in a more complex community.

Topics in Communities :

Topics provide context and show relevance.

They serve as the glue between various elements within a Salesforce community.

Topics can e associated with various data types,including

- Knowledge articles

- some Standard and Custom objects

- Chatter posts

- Files

- Users (Knowledgeable Experts)

With Topics you can associate them with files,articles,chatter posts ,object records,and they connect that content and data with users.

Groups in communities:

These are a feature of Chatter, which is a feature that has been around on the Salesforce platform for quite a while.

 In communities, however, groups have high relevance as they enable contained conversation.

 These groups can be public, private, or unlisted, and all standard Chatter functionality is supported with some additional functionality available for groups.

 

Audience Targeting in communities:

Audience targeting allows for seamless personalization of web elements.

Audiences can be constructed with various data points,including :

-User record (including related data)

-User Profile

-Location (IP-based)

-Domain

Personalization supports advanced setup via API, but code is not required.

Audience Targeting Methods:

1.Page Variations

which allows you to show a completely different page to multiple audiences.

2.Components 

components, which allows you to focus on one or more components on a particular page; this is beneficial if you want subtle, small changes and not a completely different page for a user.

3.Branding Sets

controls the overall look and feel from multiple users.

CMS and Content for Communities:

Enables advanced authoring and management of content.

Allows content to be shared with multiple targets and managed centrally.

can be associated with topics within a community.

Community Cloud is one potential channel: content can be shared with other systems.

CMS Content Types

News

Image

Document

Workspaces and channels are also important aspects of CMS.

Workspaces essentially allow you to define channels and determine where the content from each workspace can be delivered.

CMS Connect in Communities :

A low-code option to consume content from outside content management systems.

Useful for organizations looking to keep an existing CMS but using Salesforce for communities.

Supports multiple layers of content for a seamless user experience; e.g. blog posts have their own detail pages.

CMS Presentation Control in Communities:

Separates data and presentation layers.

Enables admin-friendly configuration of front end user experience elements.

supports single-item and list display.