Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Guide Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
A theme is a set of page templates plus a language for pulling in content. Knowing which template you are on saves most of the confusion.
The templates
- Home page, the category overview.
- Category and section, the two levels of navigation.
- Article, which is where readers spend their time.
- Search results.
- Request form, where a customer contacts you.
- Community pages, if you have a community.
Each is its own file. A change to one changes only that page, which is the answer to "I edited the theme and nothing happened".
Placeholders and helpers
Templates are mostly ordinary markup with placeholders where content goes: the article body, the breadcrumb, the list of sections. Helpers produce the pieces that need logic, such as a list of articles or the search box.
You are arranging and styling what Zendesk provides rather than fetching data yourself.
Shared pieces
Header and footer live in one place and appear on every template. That is where a navigation link belongs, and putting it in each template separately is how a site ends up with five slightly different headers.
Settings before code
Anything exposed as a theme setting can be changed without editing a template, and settings survive theme updates. Reach for the code only when the setting does not exist.
What you cannot change
The page structure Zendesk generates: what an article page fundamentally is, how search runs, how permissions are applied. Templates control presentation, not behaviour.
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