An ideas portal is a central place for people to give feedback and submit requests. Your portal is a reflection of your company — so it should match the look and feel of your brand for a cohesive customer experience. There are a variety of custom branding options available. So let's upload your logo, customize the theme colors, and adjust your portal's email templates to match your style.
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We will focus on settings that you can adjust yourself. But if you are ready for some advanced customization (and know a little CSS or HTML), that is an option too.
Click any of the following links to skip ahead:
Ideas portal settings
After you create your ideas portal, you will see its settings options. You will need to be an administrator with customizations permissions to configure settings. (Navigate to User menu -> Settings → Account → Ideas portals or Ideas → Overview at any time.)
From your account settings, click the name of the ideas portal you wish to edit.
From Ideas → Overview, click the pencil icon by the name of the ideas portal you wish to edit.
From there, head to the Branding tab.
Branding
Ideas portal Branding settings control how your portal looks and feels. Use them to add your logo, choose colors, and create a consistent experience for portal users.
Logo: Upload your company, product, or portal logo here. It will be visible on the portal and in all email notifications to your portal users. The ideal logo would be 480px by 300px, with a preferred aspect ratio of 1.6:1. Click Remove logo to remove your logo. You can also upload a favicon here. It must be .png, .gif, or .ico, and 16x16 pixels. Click Remove favicon to remove your favicon.
Color: This setting affects links and buttons in your ideas portal. Click the color icon to choose a color or enter a hex code. You can also upload an image of your website or product and let Elle, our AI assistant, suggest portal colors that match your brand. If needed, you can revert to the default Aha! Ideas color.
Advanced
Display
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Display: Choose your display style. Standard portals cannot be embedded and include the default header and footer, while Embedded portals allow you to load an iframe and remove the default header and footer.
Browsers are increasingly blocking cookies for iframe content that comes from a different domain. Cookies are essential for portal authentication, so users will not be able to log in if cookies are blocked. To solve this, we recommend using a CNAME for embedded portals so that they match the domain of the hosting page. Make sure the iframe code data-portal-url refers to the portal CNAME.
Code
Through advanced portal branding, you can fully customize the HTML of the header and footer as well as add your own custom CSS and JavaScript to the portal. This allows you to create a header that follows the same theme of your corporate website. It is how we customized our own ideas portal.
We won't focus on these settings in this introductory article, but if you are curious you can read more about advanced portal branding settings here.
Use Email settings to manage the messages your portal sends and how they look. You can set the sender, update email styles, customize notification templates, and choose which portal users receive notifications.
Enable: Turn portal email communication on or off. Password reset emails are not affected.
Sender: Choose the name and reply-to email address that portal users see. You can also configure a custom sending email domain (DKIM) with help from your internal technical support team.
Styles: Set the logo, theme color, alignment, and font used in portal emails. Select Send me a test to preview your changes.
Templates
Expand Advanced settings, then select Templates to customize the notifications your portal sends. You can update each template’s Subject and Body, and enable or disable individual notification types.
Your portal includes templates for the following notifications:
Invitation: Invites a user to join your portal. The text-only Greeting appears above the email body. Invitation emails are unavailable for submit-only portals and portals that use single sign-on (SSO).
New idea: Thanks a portal user for submitting an idea.
Status changed: Notifies a subscriber when an idea’s status changes.
Admin response: Notifies a subscriber when an admin response is posted.
New comment: Notifies a subscriber about a new comment.
Mention: Notifies a portal user when someone mentions them in a portal comment.
You can adjust the Subject and Body of each template to match your portal’s terminology and message.
Both fields support HTML.
The Body also supports inline CSS.
External CSS is not supported.
The Invitation greeting is a text-only field and does not support HTML or CSS.
Tokens
To add dynamic information to a template, type /$ in the editor or select a token. Available tokens depend on the template you are editing. For the complete token availability matrix, read Customize portal notification emails.
Token |
Displays |
|---|---|
|
Your ideas portal title |
|
The portal user’s first name |
|
The portal user’s last name |
|
The idea’s record reference number |
|
The idea’s summary |
|
The idea’s description |
|
The idea submitter’s name |
|
The workspace where the idea is located |
|
A link to the idea in your portal |
|
The idea’s category |
|
The idea’s current status |
|
The text of the admin response |
|
The name of the person who commented on the idea |
|
Comments on the idea |
Your changes save automatically. Select Insert default template to restore a template’s original content, or select Send me a test to preview it.
Getting started
Your first portal now matches your company brand. Next, let's populate it with data!