Add Home, Help and News tabs to the widget

Not every visitor wants to chat. Tabs turn the widget into a small messenger: a home screen, your help articles, product news and the conversation, all in one panel.

How tabs work#

A deployment starts with a single Chat tab, so the widget is just the chat, with no tab bar. Add more tabs, up to four, and a tab bar appears.

Tabs work the same on a Hosted page deployment, next to its sidebar.

Prepare Help and News content#

1. Create the collections. Open Content, which starts on Collections, select Create collection and pick the Articles preset for help articles, or News for announcements.
2. Add content. Open a collection's items (select its name) and select New content, write the Title and Body, and set Status to Published and Visibility to Public.

The widget only shows items that are both Published and Public.

Add a tab#

1. Open your deployment and go to Settings → Tabs.
2. Select Add tab. A new tab starts as Help center and goes at the end.
3. Choose its Layout and enter a Tab name.
4. Pick its Collections: the published items from these collections, in this order. Up to 20 per tab.
5. Select Save changes.

Tabs show in the order you add them. To move one, remove it and add it again. The last tab can't be removed.

The Help center tab shows one section per collection, in the order you picked them. Visitors can search, and articles open inside the widget. News shows 10 posts at a time, newest first.

Set up Home#

Write each team avatar as Name | Role | Photo URL. The role and photo are optional.

The list at the bottom of Home shows the Pinned items from the tab's collections. To add an article, open it in Content and turn on Pinned.

Home also adds two parts by itself:

• a message box that starts a new chat, when the widget has a Chat tab
• a "What's new" row with your newest post, when it has a News tab

Tab names#

The Tab name takes your own text, up to 40 characters, or a built-in key that's translated for you: tabHome, tabConversations, tabHelp and tabNews. In English these read Home, Chats, Help and News. To reword them in each language, use Chat widget → Languages → Interface text → Tabs.

See also Publish articles with Content.