HTML5 / Publish to Zendesk: Customize styles for categories,

[fabina]

Hello dear forum participants,

if someone has experience with publishing help topics as articles in Zendesk, he/she might be able to answer the following question:
Is it possible to set the styles for categories, sections and article lists in Zendesk via the flare stylesheet?

Background: We imported the theme Flare created when publishing the articles into Zendesk. Advantage: Table styles and MadCap effects such as drop downs are also available. However, the theme also affects the formatting of the categories, sections and article lists in Zendesk. For example, we use a special shade of blue for the hyperlinks in the help topics. This shade of blue is also used to display the categories etc. However, we don't want that.

[bunnycat]

I'm new to this Zendesk interaction too. I am in the exact same spot you are - I uploaded our MadCap Flare theme to Zendesk because the original theme assigned to our brand had little to no actual tech writing standards as far as headings, fonts, table formatting etc and basically "broke" our Flare HTML pages when I tested them in a POC.

I uploaded our MadCap theme to ZD, and now every stupid hyperlink (basically everything in our ZD Guides category is blue, underlined hyperlink text and looks like a newbie mistake). I've been struggling too with "how do I fix that?" sorts of questions. The MC help topics are really basic as far as ZD integration goes. And the ZD help topics are only good up to a point. They DO have articles on how to edit their code and add/edit their Category/Section/ Article templates but the changes don't seem to "stick". Like how do I make the articles' page width larger? (because right now, they are 1160px and they look terrible on a large monitor).

I'll be watching this space to see if anyone has anything pertinent to solve these issues.

My sorry I'm of no help in your quest.

[lilh]

I was tasked with figuring out how to publish from Flare to Zendesk as well. I'd never used Zendesk before. I didn't use the theme from Flare, although I did add the Flare stylesheet to the Zendesk theme as an asset and it does pick up those styles. I also figured out how to modify the Zendesk CSS so I use a combination of the two. As a side note - we are in the process of ditching Zendesk and moving to a 'real' website. The Flare integration is very unfriendly and we have way too many issues that neither Madcap nor Zendesk can solve.

[morgan]

We started integrating with Zendesk last summer and experienced a LOT of headaches with the themes and styles, so I feel your pain. I had so many issues trying to get Flare's styling to work properly/consistently in Zendesk, although at this point I think we are finally in a good place.

We used the Flare theme and then customized the Zendesk CSS from there to get it to do what we want. To keep things consistent between Flare and Zendesk, I copied the Zendesk CSS over to my Flare project (once we had things in Zendesk working the way we wanted) and now if I make changes, I make them in one place and then copy the whole thing over to the other place. Typically I make the changes in Zendesk and then just copy them over to Flare so that I have them. I've found that Flare's Preview or View options don't really give me a great sense of how it'll look in Zendesk, so Zendesk is really the "owner" of the styles for us - but I like to keep both sides in sync.

Happy to share more on our experience if you have further questions.

Thanks!
Morgan