Get Started with Lightning-Ready Rich Publisher Apps

Note

Note

Community Cloud is stepping aside for the new kid in town: Experience Cloud. Community Cloud lets you build more than just communities—you can also use it to build portals, help centers, forums, sites, mobile apps, and manage your content. So to better reflect the many types of experiences you can create, we’re now called Experience Cloud. While we’re excited to announce this new name to the world, note that the name in the product is remaining Community Cloud for a little bit longer. Use Experience Cloud for all powerful features you’ve come to cherish with Community Cloud.

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
  • Describe what Rich Publisher Apps are.
  • List some use cases for Rich Publisher Apps.
  • Describe the basic architecture of a Rich Publisher App.

Get the Competitive Advantage

Instead of just adding a file or link to your feed post, imagine attaching a live video, an eye-catching GIF, or an interactive widget. With the Rich Publisher Apps platform, just about anything is possible. Use the platform to build, configure, and integrate up to five custom apps into the feed publisher. Give your users the kind of “available right here, right now” convenience that sets you ahead of your competitors.

A mapping Rich Publisher App on a feed item

With Rich Publisher Apps you can:

  • Attach a case to a post.
  • Insert GIF files or famous quotations.
  • Kick off a video meeting.
  • Attach a Trailhead module.
  • [Your ideas here!]

In this module, we describe how to build a Rich Publisher App to make your feeds more dynamic and open them up to third-party services.

Note

Note

The Lightning Component framework has two programming models, Lightning Web Components and Aura. In this module, we build Rich Publisher Apps using Aura.

So How Does It Work?

The Rich Publisher Apps platform gives you all the necessary tools for creating and integrating interactive apps into the feed publisher.

There are three ways to add a Rich Publisher App to your site.

  • Get it from AppExchange.
  • Build a custom app in your org.
  • Port an app through change sets or packages.

Methods for adding Rich Publisher Apps to an org

From Org to Site

Once you add a Rich Publisher App to an org, it’s available to all the org’s Experience Cloud sites. Site managers and admins can select and enable available apps in their site's Administration Workspace.

When you add a Rich Publisher App to a site, members see the app’s icon in the publisher, next to Attach file icon.

This example shows a feed publisher with three custom app integrations. There are icons for attaching a case (1), a GIF (2), and a Trailhead module (3).

Rich Publisher App icons in the question publisher

From Site to Publisher

Rich Publisher Apps icons appear in the post and question publishers in group, topics, Direct Messages, and user profile feeds. They don’t appear in the poll publisher.

Note

Note

In the question publisher, Rich Publisher App icons appear in the Details section under the rich text editor.

Site members click the icon to open a selection box.

The Rich Publisher selection box

They select something, click Add, then Share or Ask, and Salesforce publishes their post with the attachment.

A Rich Publisher App payload included with a question post

Key Development Concepts

In the next unit, we walk you through creating a dynamic Rich Publisher App. To follow along, it’ll be useful to understand a few concepts.

Payload is a key concept in developing Rich Publisher Apps. A payload is a part of a feed item representation. It’s the thing that’s attached to the feed item—the video, GIF, or widget.

Feed item representation showing a payload

The payload can be a string, a base64 encoded JSON object—whatever you choose. As the developer, you have control over the payload.

When Salesforce fetches a feed item through an API:

  1. It associates the payload with the feed item.
  2. It fetches the payload.
  3. It sends the payload to render in the feed along with the feed item data.

Now let’s look at an overview of the architecture.

The four main components of Rich Publisher Apps

  • Composition component (Lightning component)
  • Render component (Lightning component)
  • Icon (Image file shown in publisher)
  • Localizable labels (the header and hover text)

Main components of a Rich Publisher App

Next, we step through the process of creating these elements and bringing them together into a cohesive and dynamic Rich Publisher App.