What are Quick Links?
The Quick Links menu helps your community members navigate to essential parts of your community. By default, this menu appears in your side panel on most community pages, and here we include some helpful links here to things like your Categories list, your Recent Discussions page, your drafts, bookmarks, Group pages, Unanswered queue and more.
How do I customize the Quick Links?
This feature is available with Release 2021.002
Getting Started
Quick Link settings and style options are available in our new Theme Editor. This editor works best with Foundation-based themes which use all editable components, but can be used with any theme to customize new default components that may be enabled in your custom themes, or legacy Vanilla base themes like Bootstrap3, Deflector & Keystone.
If you are already using our theme editor to customize your Foundation-base theme, you can simply edit your existing theme to start editing your Quick Links
If you have not yet used our theme editor, or have a custom or legacy theme in use, navigate to the Themes section of your Dashboard Settings. Here you can copy your existing theme to launch the editor.
N.B. The changes you make here should not impact your existing customizations, those are indeed copied and saved. The changes you make here will only apply to our new components like Knowledge Base pages, Quick Links Menu, or other similar components that may have been enabled upon request to your CSM.
In the editor's menu, select Quick Links under the Content section
Editing Your Links
Click the Quick Links List "Edit" Button
This will launch the links editor where you can rename, or hide our existing links. Simply hover over the link you wish you edit, and select "Edit" or "Hide."
Drag and drop links in the order in which you'd like them to appear.
N.B. Our default links cannot be deleted, nor can their paths be edited, this is to allow you to still leverage our default pages later on if you wish.
Adding New Links
You can also add new links to other key pages or your community, or other important sites or pages you or your users might need.
Click the "New Link" button in the top right hand corner of the modal and a new row should appear.
Give your link a Title, which will appear in the UI.
Paste or type the URL to point to.
N.B. You can use relative paths for internal pages e.g. /discussions, /profile, or use a full URL to point to external pages. Make sure you use https protocol for these links. e.g. https//vanillaforums.com
Editing the Quick Link Menu Styles
The theme editor also allows you to apply basic styling options to the Quick Links menu.
List Seperation
Use the List Divider Style setting to enable borders or horizontal separators for you links.
Container Border
Use the Border Style setting to enable a border or shadow for your menu.
Text
Use the Title, Link & Count Colour settings to update the colours used in your menu.
Background Colour & Font Settings
The background colour and font-family can be applied to your Quick Links menu in the Theme Editor's Global Styles section. Here you can:
- Apply a Dark theme preset to apply a dark background & lighter font quickly and easily
- Use the "Body" section to make changes to the Background Colour, Text Colour, Link Colours & Font Family.
- You are able to apply custom fonts, find out more here.
