Question about Community Category Component

Hi twitchee27,

Sephora is using the new Social Marketing Solution (http://lithium.com/solutions/social-marketing/overview), for which that component was originally designed. I did a quick test with the component on the Social Support Solution, and it appears to work there as well; however, it lacks the nice styling that you see on Sephora because you won't have the necessary CSS rules from the Social Marketing Solution.

If you wanted to use the component, you should be able to add your own CSS to style as needed. The name of the component is common.widget.click-only-sidebar-menu. You will have to add it manually to the page XML since it's not available in the component menu. You'll want to add this line in the desired location:

    <component id="common.widget.click-only-sidebar-menu"/>

Keep in mind that since this component is intended for the Social Marketing Solution, it may not be fully supported for the Social Support Solution.

If you wanted to build your own custom component like this, it should be pretty straight forward. There are REST API calls to get a list of categories. Then for each category, you can use a different REST API call to get the count of messages in each.

I hope this helps!