New Feature Research: Custom Pages

I’m glad you’re working on this. It’s one of the first features I was looking for when we launched Insided at my last company. 

Some quick answers: 

1. Use cases: specific user journeys (may be for persona, journey stage, or other segmentation)
2. Widgets: My strong preference for every customizable page is to have every widget in the Widget Library available at my disposal
3. Permissions: No strong opinions here. I guess I’d limit managing them to Admins and Community Manager roles. Most use cases I can think of wouldn’t require segmenting access for end users, but that’d be interesting to consider (use case: a launch pad for super user/moderator resources, rather than trying to do that in a group or community category .. quicklinks and other widgets would be a better UX)
4. Navigation: Ideally the mega menu would be more customizable for drop-downs, etc. But the custom links there are probably enough for most use cases. And I already do a lot with CSS and third party scripts to customize the mega menu. 

1. Use cases: For what purpose would you require custom pages? What goals do you hope to achieve? 
   Custom pages could essentially act as landing pages on your community. They could showcase specific community programs, a directory of members, a directory of super users or champions, serve as a landing page for a large scale community event, or highlight another company resource (like education/LMS) to further help in the goal of making the community the central go-to place for customers.
    
2. Widgets: Which widgets are essential to achieve the goal?
   - The same as what is currently in existence but it would be extra nice to be able to drag widgets around even more than we currently can.
   - A new widget could be a “member list” and you could then select to show members from a specific group, forum, rank, with a certain badge, or custom role.
   - A widget similar to the introduction bar or statistic bar which we could customize with information pulled from Analytics or edit directly ourselves.
    
3. Permissions: Who can manage the custom pages? Who can access the custom pages?
   Admins, Community Managers
    
4. Navigation: How would end-users ideally navigate to your custom pages?
   Flexibility with the mega menu to layer custom links into drop downs just like the mega menu. Or custom link itself.

One quick thought on this: URL configuration. 

Here’s one specific use case we had that I used the KB overview page for. The /knowledge-base URL isn’t a problem for it, but obviously I’d prefer the ability to do a custom URL based on the page title instead. 

So that’s a feature of this that I’d recommend investing some R&D in.

Love this, and can’t wait for this to arrive. I think this will expand the possibilites of what the community can deliver for sure.
 

1. Use cases: For what purpose would you require custom pages? What goals do you hope to achieve? 
   I see a lot of use cases - we use our community utilizing the knowledge base a lot, creating guides and ”how to” articles. I think creating custom pages that for example contains guides for specific products and being able to use widgets making it easier to navigate and find the right answer would be great. 
    
2. Widgets: Which widgets are essential to achieve the goal? 
   I think the more the merrier. I think the HTML-widget is a must-have! 
    
3. Permissions: Who can manage the custom pages? Who can access the custom pages? 
   Much like other pages, you should be able to toggle this in the back-end. 
    
4. Navigation: How would end-users ideally navigate to your custom pages? 
   Having widgets on the homepage/knowledge base and/or in the header/nav bar. 
   Would also be nice to access custom pages while inside of a knowledge base category via CTA’s, widgets etc (in my specific use case)

• Use cases: Product landing pages, Campaign landing pages → Custom pages will serve as a hub for the product or campaign with internal (community) and external (company website) links
• Widgets: I want to have the same customizability as for the home page, i.e. the same widgets like Quick Links, Featured Topics, Hero / Search banner, curated content, the ability to create containers (for content and sidebar area)
• Permissions:
  • Manage: Admin, Community manager
  • View: Same behaviour as permissions for category pages
• Navigation: Via widgets on the home page or (parent) category pages, via widgets in the sidebar, via custom Mega Menu item, via direct link

Other important things:

• URL: I want to be able to manually create the relative URL
• SEO: I want to be able to customize the SEO title and SEO description
• SEO visibility: I want to be able to customize the meta robots behaviour

This is really exciting. 
 

1. Use cases: Product landing pages, Events (lunch and learns) that we host where they can go register, and dedicated pages for enhancements.
2. Widgets: The more the better widgets. Would love to be able to build a form as well on these pages. 
3. Permissions: Manage: Admins or manager
   View: based on roles
4. Navigation: Direct link

Thank you @DannyPancratz  @security_lion @bjoern_schulze @Hannah Bailey @JeppePeppe for your feedback.

@Sudhanshu some nice juicy ideas in here.

Can I have custom page option somewhere on February? :)

I would like to have custom category and child category pages. I have special need for special category.

Hi @Sudhanshu!

Any updates on when this might launch? We could really use something like this as we look to “re-launch” our community in February/March. 

Thanks :)

Hi @nicksimard and @revote, Custom pages is currently being developed to be released in February.
 

@revote Could you please elaborate a bit on this need of a special category?

Category page should work as a landing page as well, where we push the traffic from external sites, Social media and so on.

So this category / landing page should have Banner widget, to explain the page and what’s in it. Or maybe it should have several Banner widgets and in several locations in the page.

Hero banner should not include search.

It should have cards (links) to the child categories, just like normal category has.

This category / landing page should not have same widgets than other categories have.

If possible, the topic pages what this special category have, they should not have same widgets than other topic pages have.

This in a general level, I can explain more if needed via email or PM.

This is pretty much something what I am looking for. Also I wish to have the Banner widgets + cards to the child categories + customizable topic pages.