A Python Library for Khoros Community
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash One of my favorite things about working at Khoros and writing about our products is that I get to witness the Khoros mission play out in real-life situations. This happens often in chat experiences I know are powered by Modern Chat and the Khoros Automation Framework, and I also see it in brand outreach via social media. But one of the most rewarding examples is when I see something exemplifying the power of Community – connecting, helping, and sharing with the intention of making life easier. Community is more than a product. It's a mindset. Today we're highlighting a contribution by a developer who embodies the Community spirit. He built an open-source Python SDK for Khoros Community and we want to share it with other Community customers. Other developers working with Khoros Community have already contributed to his project. I got a chance to chat with this developer over Zoom to learn more about his Khoros journey and the Python library. Note: The Python library discussed in this article is not part of Khoros's official Community platform, has not been tested by Khoros, and is not supported by Khoros. Q&A What does the Python library provide? I've tried to keep the library flexible to support different work patterns. I built it to be as generic or detailed as a user needs it to be. For example, you could use the khoros.messages.create function to create a message or simply use khoros.get if you just want a shortcut for a GET request. At a high level, the project package is comprised of Primary modules, including the Core object and module and Supporting modules. The Core object/module object is your hub. You'll Instantiate the Core object by passing Khoros credentials. The Core module is a collection of core functions and tools to work with the Khoros Community APIs. Other Primary modules: handle interactions with the Community REST APIs facilitate authenticating to Khoros Community environments enable API queries using the LiQL syntax provide functions to work with various Community API objects and structures (e.g. community, categories, nodes, and tenants) facilitate working with SAML assertions retrieve Community Plugin SDK details (SDK and dependency versions, installation state) The library's Supporting modules: contain classes supporting error and exceptions handling provide tools and utilities like dictionary conversion, timestamp formatting, and environment variable retrieval/update help with their Community Plugin SDK set up and publishing support helper file import and parsing to facilitate ease of use and configuration setting for the package perform unit testing What are some of the more popular modules? Probably the Objects module. The functions to create and update users and roles are heavily used. Publishing messages on behalf of other users also gets a lot of use. Other functions simplify cumbersome processes like cre…633ViewsSign in to react to this post0CommentsA Chatbot for the Dev Doc Portal
If you came to the Developer Documentation Portal lately, you might have noticed a chatbot icon in the lower right corner of the page. We shared in a previous Dev Blog post how TravisB and others built Maia, Khoros's virtual assistant, using Khoros Flow, Modern Chat, and the Khoros Automation Framework API. Up to now, users have engaged with Maia on Atlas and Khoros.com. Now, Maia also graces the pages of developer.khoros.com. Why Maia? First of all, we like to use the Dev Doc Portal to highlight Khoros products and features whenever we can. And Maia is cool -- it is a single chatbot that handles multiple chat flows across multiple websites using Khoros technology. But really, we added Maia to create a better user experience. Here's what Maia can do for you on developer.khoros.com: Register on Atlas File a Support ticket Go to Atlas resources like Product Coaching, Knowledge Bases, and Product Idea boards Connect with a chat agent to help find a resource or get other help with Atlas Connect with a sales agent Schedule a demo Learn about Khoros solutions Find the latest content from Khoros including release notes, product & Khoros insights blogs, podcasts & webinars Learn about our Khoros Titans user group program Get started with Maia To get started with Maia, just open the chatbot and enter "hi". From there, just follow Maia's prompts. Check out this post for Maia tips and tricks. Gratitude I want to give a special shout-out to PradeepK for helping us get Maia on the Dev Doc Portal as one of his first projects here at Khoros and to TravisB or working out the right flows for our Developer customers. Couldn't have done this without you two! Final Thoughts Let us know what you think about the new addition to developer.khoros.com in the comments section below. We hope Maia makes your life a little bit easier.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsCan Technical Writers Exist in an Agile Dev Team?
Technical writers are an important part of any software development team working on projects or products with customer-facing components. Whether you're creating a simple UI-based tool for customers without any technical experience or an API with complex parameters that pose a challenge to even the most experienced developers, a technical writer bridges the information gap between your development team and the end-user. So, how do you integrate a technical writer into your agile development environment? What role(s) does a technical writer perform within your organization's development team? In this post, we will cover some tips for doing just that! Scrum and Planning Meetings Technical writers are often considered outsiders within an engineering environment. They are typically outnumbered by engineers and frequently work with multiple engineering groups at the same time. This makes it easy to see them as an outside entity rather than a member of the scrum team. However, this perception doesn't take into account the many hats a technical writer wears. A technical writer is like an embedded reporter, writing stories about the projects the scrum team(s) are working on. Those stories benefit from having detailed knowledge of not only what the project is about, but what decisions went into its creation. Knowing why it made more sense to create a feature with one set of parameters over another helps the writer to explain the benefits (and potential snags) to the audience. Consider including technical writers in scrum meetings, as well as in planning sessions where new projects are conceptualized. This will not only provide much-needed context to the writer but save your team time explaining these details later on. Location One common mistake organizations make in their office layouts is to group technical writers in with marketing, design, etc., and sit them with those teams, away from the engineering department. In an in-person working environment, you should consider sitting your technical writers with the engineers. Separating them physically prevents the writers from hearing and absorbing the day-to-day discussions that happen, often resulting in missed opportunities for documenting changes as they occur. Development Environments It's important for technical writers to have access to the same level of development/testing environment as the engineering teams. Even if it's a local deployment of a nightly build, being able to explore and see the code in advance of the documentation being required gives writers a head start on their work. The amount of time the writer has to use and document the upcoming release, the better the documentation. This also allows technical writers to fill another important role that they often do: testing. In order to document a new feature, writers test their documented steps. This enables them to not only discover bugs in their documentation but often to uncover bugs in …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsHow We Built the KB Audit Flow Part 2: Audit Checkbox (Updated)
The KB Audit Flow requires two components to work. The first is an audit checkbox that enables members with specific roles to mark a KB article as "audited" from the front end. This checkbox includes the initial check and confirmation. The second component is the 'Last Reviewed' Information component which displays the date and time of the last audit of the KB article. That component is displayed for all visitors, regardless of their role(s). It does, however, check the member's roles to determine whether or not to additionally display the audit checkbox featured in this post. In this post, we will create a new audit checkbox component. Note: These instructions cover the method for creating the component using the Community Plugin SDK. For an easier UI-based approach, we recommend using Studio to create the component. The content of the file below remains the same. We highly recommend reading the other two posts in this series to get a better understanding of the other components and prerequisites required for this component to function properly. How We Built the KB Audit Flow Pt. 1 How We Built the KB Audit Flow Pt. 3: Review Date Display Create a Custom Endpoint A custom endpoint enables the audit checkbox component to send the "last reviewed" timestamp to Khoros, updating the date and time the article was last audited. To create this custom endpoint: Navigate to Studio > Endpoints Select the New Endpoint button Enter last-reviewed-date in the title field Select Save Enter the following in the View Content field: <#assign msg_id = http.request.parameters.name.get("msg_id", "")?string /> <#assign date_time = http.request.parameters.name.get("date_time", "")?string /> <#if msg_id != ""> <#assign lastReviewedDateResponse = restadmin("/messages/id/${msg_id}/metadata/key/custom.message_last_reviewed_date/set?value=${date_time}") /> </#if> Select Save This creates a new custom endpoint which passes the message identifier and datetime to Khoros. It is utilized by the Audit checkbox component we are creating next. Create LastReviewed-Audited-checkbox.ftl file The process for creating the checkbox component is pretty straightforward. To start, create the LastReviewed-Audited-checkbox.ftl file as a component. For example: /res/components/LastReviewed-Audited-checkbox.ftl. Here are the contents of that file: <style> .audited-component-checkbox{ margin-top: -20px; margin-bottom: 35px; } label.lia-form-label.audited-label-set { padding-top: 4px; font-weight: bold !important; float:left; } .litho-audited-checkbox-style{ float: left; } .lia-form-label-wrapper.audited-label-float{ float: left; } .lia-inline-confirm.confirm-label-float{ float: right; margin-top: 4px; margin-left: 12px; } a.litho-tkb-audited-deny { cursor: pointer; } a.litho-tkb-audited-approve…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsHow We Built the KB Audit Flow Pt. 1
Trust in the accuracy of your Knowledge Base articles is essential to building trust and confidence between your visitors and the content they're interacting with within your knowledge base. One way of ensuring that each KB article is current and accurate is frequent and routine audits on that content. The audit process should be straightforward for your authors, administrators, and moderators, and transparent for your readers. To make this process as seamless and easy as possible on Khoros Atlas, we created an auditing solution that enables members with the appropriate permissions to set the article as "audited" and to display the date and time of the last audit to visitors. In this three-part series, we're going to take a detailed look at how we built out this auditing solution in Khoros Atlas. We highly recommend reading the next two posts in this series to get a better understanding of the other components and prerequisites required for this component to function properly. How We Built the KB Audit Flow Pt. 2: Audit Checkbox How We Built the KB Audit Flow Pt. 3: Review Date Display Concept Our 'Last Reviewed' component enables members with the appropriate roles (defined in the 'Last Reviewed' component we will create in this guide series) to see a checkbox in the sidebar of each KB article enabling them to indicate that the article has been audited. This "Audited" checkbox. When the box is checked, the time and date are saved as part of the audit trail. Note: The role(s) required to see the Audited checkbox are set within the "Last Reviewed" information component we will create in the second part of this blog series. Once that data has been saved, it is then displayed in the sidebar. This enables visitors to see when the article was last reviewed. This enables them to gauge how up-to-date the information in the KB article is. Member Flow For permissioned members, auditing an article is as simple as reviewing it on the front end and selecting the Audited checkbox. Once done, a confirmation message appears enabling the member to confirm the audited state by selecting Yes, or cancel it by selecting No. Once confirmed, the date and time data is saved and that date and time become the new "Last Reviewed" date displayed to all visitors in the sidebar. Prerequisites Before this functionality can be added to the Khoros Communities instance, we need to make a few changes on the back end to create a space where metadata containing the audit timestamps and status for each message will exist. This requires a few steps that Support can assist you with. To get your instance ready to work with the Audit Flow, simply submit a support request using the Case Portal and request that your Communities instance be configured to support Audit Flow. Case Study: Khoros Information Experience Team Our Product Content Experience Team is responsible for writing and ma…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentHow we built it: Search Anywhere and the Resource Center
In 2019, the Customer Experience team at Khoros planned to improve the digital experience of our customers through a series of initiatives. One of the primary tasks was to make Atlas the focal point of documentation and support articles for Marketing products, just like it was for Care products. The change involved two steps: Moving all our product technical and functional documentation from third-party software to Atlas Maintain the ability to search for documentation from within the product websites i.e. search for documentation from Marketing and Care platforms from the in-app Resource Center What is the Resource Center? The Resource Center in this post refers to the tool powered by third-party software (Pendo) to house additional contextual help and include standard help articles or FAQs, as well as in-app Guides that will walk users through specific processes. Most of the existing Marketing customers were frequent users of the search within the app tool. So, it was important for us to retain this experience. However, these changes were due in less than two months, given the licensing deadline with a third-party application. This presented two key challenges: How to look up information from the Community? How to embed the Search Anywhere tool (yes, that’s what we named it internally) into the Resource Center and into the product website? How we solved looking up information from Community: Community platform supports the awesome API layer, known in developer circles, as LiQL - the Lithium Query Language LiQL enables you to search Community information based on tags, title etc. However, you must have the “correct” permissions via the API keys in order to pull the information The Triumph team built the oAuth based mechanism to provide the API access from a web application The premise was that we could register the Search Anywhere tool as an app on the Community platform and use the specific keys to make API calls and this is how it works currently A key feature that was necessary was to limit the ability to only lookup information limited to only certain “boards” (or nodes if you happen to know Community well). We achieved this by attaching a unique role, based on the application (Marketing or Care) We registered unique apps for Care and Marketing to “sandbox” access to relevant information within each of the products We needed the ability to show some posts by “default”, for example, if you land on the “Social Marketing” page in the Marketing product, the tool would show “top” posts from the “Social Marketing” board in our Community We achieved this using “tags”, a way to label the posts in Community. This required identifying and tagging the relevant posts in specific boards in the Community. Our Product Content Experience team helped with this laborious but important task. Going the extra mile -- Integrating Resource Center into Community and Community Analyt…ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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