Highlights as start page hides the Community overview

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Author: Christoph Stoettner
Read in about 3 min · 442 words
Community Communities Hightlights Startpage

Ideas

Photo by Kathy Jones | Pexels

Connections 7 creates the Community Highlights page automatically and sets it as the start page for new communities.

That’s configured in the highway service, which is available for administrative users on https://your_connections_url/connections/config/highway.main.gatekeeper.tiles

Option to set the Highlights page as overview page for new created communities.

So far so good, the community menu looks way cleaner, until today I haven’t thought about this.

I started playing around with my new community. The default highlights page looks something like this:

Default highlights page after creating a new community

Now I added a second richtext widget to it (that’s normal for many users, some use rich content as others a blog to announce something):

New widget with additional Rich Content

No Overview visible, so how shall I add a Rich Content Instance? I asked HCL Support and they explained:

Overview page could be back by editing the existing community, please follow below steps:

  1. Go to existing community
  2. Click on edit community under Community Actions
  3. set start page to overview
  4. save and close

HCL Support

So I started to search. Yes there is an option to enable Overview in the Community settings and when I switch this to anything else than Highlights the Overview page appears in the menu. So it is just hidden.

k, then I asked for an enhancement request, I don’t think we can ask any Community owner to switch the start page for his community just to add the Rich Content widget.

The process to add a Rich Content Widget in Highlights if Highlights is the start page and should be the start page after the process:

  1. Add Rich Content to highlights
  2. Community Actions > Edit Community
  3. Switch start page to anything but highlights
  4. Save and close
  5. Open Overview
  6. Community Actions > Add Apps
  7. Select Richtext
  8. Community Actions > Edit Community
  9. Switch start page to anything but highlights
  10. Save and close

I even tried to Community Actions > Add Apps without having Overview open, this creates Richtext widgets in the Overview (checked when I switched it on), but the widgets in Highlights don’t find them! During my tests only Richtext widgets are mapped from Overview to Highlights, if you create them when the Overview is open. In one case when I added two widgets in Highlights first, both widgets show the content of the Richtext Widget in Overview.

Overview page with three Rich Content widgets, two created from any app and #3 is created during Overview was open

Both Rich Content widgets in Highlights show content from #3

So I created an enhancement request, please vote for it , when you think the same.

Update: The enhancement request is no longer available.

Author

Christoph Stoettner

I work at Vegard IT GmbH as a senior consultant with a focus on collaboration software, Kubernetes, security and automation. I mainly deal with HCL Connections, WebSphere Application Server, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform and Linux.

Sometimes my daily work results in technical talks and blog articles, which you can follow here more or less regularly. You can find the presentations in the main menu under public speaking .

I created a list of tools I use regularly, most of which have been released under an open source license.

In my spare time I read a lot, test all kinds of technical software and gadgets and try to follow about 200 RSS feeds.
Here you can find a collection of them.

This is my private blog, all opinions are my own.

           

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