Employee Center, Knowledge widgets, and branding/themes

[Gavin Jolly2]

I have encountered issues with OOTB plugins not following the styles set for Employee Center. One important issue for me is the Knowledge Article Content widget. It is in another scope and seems to have hardcoded styles which reference the Knowledge portal and not the EC/ESC portal. It does not pick up colours from the theme set for the Employee Centre.

If I close the Widget and put it in the Employee Centre (CORE, PRO, ???) scope it returns system errors as it obviously needs content from its scope

1. How can I make an OOTB widget work fully in Employee Centre, with its branding and styles
2. Are there EC widgets for Knowledge, Catalog, etc which will follow the EC theme and branding

[Susan Britt]

You can override widget CSS in multiple ways without customizing the widget. From your EC portal record, open the associated “Theme”. At the bottom of the Theme, you will see a related list (tab) for CSS Includes. If you have created a custom Theme, the OOB CSS Includes were probably not added or your modified versions of them. The OOB ones will start with EC or ESC. These will control the colors across the portal as a whole. 

Be careful if you have EC Pro with changing pages and widgets. The URL may show you are on kb_article page for example, but there are Page Route Maps that will redirect to ESC pages instead (e.g., esc_kb_view). Verify there before editing page or widgets to make sure you are working with the right ones. 

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

If your issue with the widget is only the styling (this is the especially the case for multiple widgets which are not Employee Center specific though Service Portal general widgets, like some knowledge widgets, the related articles widget, etc), then please don't clone and edit the widget. I see this happening at a lot of customers, while in most cases it's really a bad horrible practice if it's just for styling.

As Susan mentioned: override CSS.

For example using Widget Instance CSS, Page Specific CSS, CSS Includes on your portal Theme.

Kind regards,
Mark

[Mark Roethof]

I just published a small article on styling old Service Portal widgets for Employee Center using the Related articles widget as example.

2022-11-21 - Article - Styling old Service Portal widgets on Employee Center

Kind regards,
Mark