Developing an LWC Community Page to Access all Knowledge Articles From a Single Point: A Success Story

Derek was a community manager at a high-end integrated HR and payroll software solutions provider based out of the USA. The company’s customer community was hosted on Salesforce Community Cloud and they were using Salesforce Knowledge as their knowledge-base.

He noticed a pattern that the articles, once published, were getting initial traction but nothing once they disappeared from the ‘Latest Articles’ section in the community. This was impacting the overall performance of their knowledge articles.

He introspected for the possible reasons behind the subpar performance of their articles. He also conducted interactions with their users. An important aspect that was common in his findings was the lack of a single page to access all knowledge articles.

So, Derek decided to develop a single-point destination on their community, from where their users could access all the knowledge articles.

He reached out to our team, their Salesforce consulting partner, with the requirement. Our team assessed their system and came across a limitation, i.e, Salesforce does not offer any standard component to enable a single-destination view for ‘Articles’.

How did we help Derek?

Since their Salesforce Org was Lightning-enabled and their community was also on the Lightning Experience, our Salesforce experts proffered to develop a custom LWC (Lightning Web Component) page. Derek and his management agreed.

So, we developed the outline of the page with the necessary components and functionalities. The page was designed to complement the existing community designs and patterns. Following are some of the highlights of the custom LWC page developed by our Salesforce experts:

• Title-based search functionality to let users search the relevant knowledge article on-the-go. The search works either by clicking the ‘search’ tab in the search box or by clicking ‘enter’ upon entering the search value.Also, the default page view is restored, once the search value is deleted.
• In addition to the standard listing of articles based on the date (latest ones), our experts added a few out-of-the-box filters to sort the articles based on different aspects like Date, Most Viewed, Best Rating, etc.
• We developed the ‘Multi-Select Data Category’ functionality, enabling which would allow users to select more than one category/sub-category. It can also be disabled and then only the articles of the selected category/sub-category will be visible.

A few advanced filtering conditions were added to facilitate easy sorting of articles, if the user enabled Multi-Select Data category:

1. For the categories, the ‘And’ condition was applied to sort the articles.
2. For the sub-categories (belonging to the same category or to say hierarchy), the ‘Or’ condition was applied for the sorting of articles.

Conclusion

Following the development of the custom LWC page, the community users of Derek’s company were able to see all the knowledge articles from a single view on the basis of Data Category.

Users could easily find relevant articles on-the-go with advanced filters and search. The performance of knowledge articles improved significantly and Derek’s company also witnessed an improvement in case deflection.

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