Get Started with Lightning-Ready Rich Publisher Apps
Learning Objectives
- 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.
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.
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.
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 .
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).
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.
Site members click the icon to open a selection box.
They select something, click Add, then Share or Ask, and Salesforce publishes their post with the attachment.
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.
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:
- It associates the payload with the feed item.
- It fetches the payload.
- 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)
Next, we step through the process of creating these elements and bringing them together into a cohesive and dynamic Rich Publisher App.