Salesforce Winter 20 Release has lot of enhancement for lighting communities. Now we can build highly customized pages with flexible layouts. We can use role-based access to control who can do what as team builds and customizes communities. We can create multiple navigation menus, and use and reuse them in any navigation menu component, including tile menus.

Flexible Layouts for Pages

Now we can experience the freedom of flexible layouts and use them to build highly customized pages. We can make fancy with adjustable columns and easy-to-add sections. Excellent background images and color can make community better.

How we can change layout:

To change a column size, grab and drag the handles between the columns. Use the Section Style options to customize your images, color, section height, and content width. Add sections using the + icon to stack them and build out the page.

New Page Creation:

In Community Builder, open the Pages menu in the top toolbar. Select New Page | Standard Page. Then select Flexible Layout, and begin building your page. To use a flexible layout with an existing page, create a page variation.

Manage Contributors and Their Roles in Builder

Managing a community used to be a challenge because administrators with community management permissions had complete access to all communities and their functionality. Administrative access was required to make most community updates.

Now Role-based access makes it easy to control who can do what as your team builds and customizes your site in Community Builder. Add contributors and assign roles from the Administration tile in Community Workspaces.

Now we can add users as contributors to Community Workspaces in a specific community and assign them one of the following roles.

Experience admin

Experience admin contributors can do everything in an assigned community. They have access to Community Builder, can manage contributors, and publish the site.

Publisher

Publisher will help in building and publishing and they have access to Community Builder. They can publish the site in an assigned community. Publisher can’t manage contributors. They have read-only access to the Community Workspaces Administration| Contributors tab.

Builder

Builder can help building the assigned community. They have access to Community Builder. They can’t publish the site or manage contributors. They have read-only access to the Community Workspaces Administration | Contributors tab.

Viewer

Viewers have read-only access to Community Builder in an assigned community. They can’t publish the site or manage contributors. They have read-only access to the Community Workspaces Administration | Contributors tab.

How to add these roles:

Salesforce admin or an experience admin can add contributors in that community. In community, go to Community Workspaces, and select the Administration tile. Then select Contributors | Add Contributor, and assign roles as required.

Reference for community member : Add Members to Your Community

Set Up Navigation Menu Variations

Now we can create multiple navigation menus and use and reuse them in any navigation menu and tile menu components. We can have different navigation menus on different theme layouts and create custom navigation menu components that are based on existing menus.

Clearer Character Limits on Questions

Community feeds have character limit of 255 characters on a Question field. We can find out character limit after you clicked Ask. Now the limit is clearly noted on the Question field, and application stops us when you reach 255 characters.

Make Files on Records Visible to Customers

By default, files on records aren’t visible to customers in communities. Now we can share records with customers in communities. We can decide which files customers can see on those records.

Use the new Customer Access option on a file’s sharing detail page to choose when customers can see the file.

How to do this : On Files home in Salesforce, from the row-level action list or file preview, click Share. To see where the file is shared, in the sharing detail window, expand the Who Can Access section. The customer access option is visible in the sharing detail of any file shared with a record.

Screenshot of sharing screen with customer access toggle

To set the sharing level, in the picklist next to the toggle, select Viewer to give the customer view access to the file.

If we choose Set by Record, then the customer’s file access depends on their record access. View access on the record provides view access to the file, and edit access on the record provides collaborator access on the file.

Create and Assign Many Audiences at Once Using APIs (Pilot)

We can use Chatter REST API and Metadata API to create audiences and assign them to targets, such as pages, components, and branding sets. Assigning a large number of audiences at once is useful when we want to assign a location-based audience to multiple components across your org.

Delegate Management of Permission Sets

Delegated external user administrators can now manage the permission sets of other external users on their account. No more duplicate profiles is required.

Modal for managing permission sets by moving them from the available to the selected columns.

Make It Easier for Delegated Admins to Create New Users

While adding members to a partner community, delegated external admins no longer need to enter language and locale settings manually. Instead, we can use a dropdown menu with prepopulated fields to enter language, locale, and Chatter settings.

New User modal in Members tab of Account Management

Broaden Horizons with More Width Control

All default theme layouts in Lightning theme templates now include the option to set the maximum page width. Let pages boldly span to the edges of the browser window, or set specific pixel size boundaries to control the width of the content across the page.

How to do this:

In Community Builder, select Theme Panel | Theme Settings. Select Set max page width and use the slider to set the width. If we deselect Set max page width, the page width fills the page. This setting doesn’t affect the header, hero or footer, custom overrides, and existing theme layouts.

Improve Tracking with the New Google Analytics™ Standard

Google Analytics is integrated using global site tag (gtag.js) standard, so we now have access to the latest tracking features and integrations from Google.

How to do this: New communities are automatically using the gtag standard. Communities created before Winter ’20 must manually update to the newest community template to take advantage of this capability.

If custom Lightning components is used for Communities, use the forceCommunity:analyticsInteractionGtag to track events triggered by your custom component.

For example, we could create a custom button and include the forceCommunity:analyticsInteractionGtag event in the button’s controller. Whenever a user clicks the button, event data is sent to Google Analytics.

Get Warned Before Switching Community Templates

Switching a template permanently deletes our customizations and pages within the community. Now when we attempt to switch to a different template, we will receive a message confirming that we want to make the change.

Reference : https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

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