Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Knowledge 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. The language they are written in is called Curlybars, which is the term to search for when an example does not work.
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.
Pages of your own, on Enterprise
The list above is not the whole set. You can also build custom pages from scratch, each with its own URL, for a landing page or to embed something from outside Zendesk. They sit outside the section and topic structure, and an account can hold up to 100 of them.
They need Suite Enterprise or Knowledge Enterprise, and there is a trap below that. On Growth and Professional the option to add a custom page is present but the page will not work. That is deliberate, so a theme bought from the Marketplace that contains custom pages still installs, and it means an admin can build one, see no error, and find it dead.
Templating v1, v2 and v3 are ending
Zendesk announced on 14 September 2026 that templating API versions 1, 2 and 3 reach end of life. Every help centre theme has to be on v4 by 31 July 2027, and themes still on an older version are upgraded automatically on that date.
The rollout has four moments.
- 14 September 2026. New accounts can no longer import a v1, v2 or v3 theme.
- 25 November 2026. A ZCLI upgrade tool arrives for custom-coded themes.
- 1 March 2027. An upgrade tool appears in the product itself, and importing an older theme is blocked for every account.
- 31 July 2027. Whatever is left is upgraded for you, and v1, v2 and v3 are removed.
What this means depends on your theme. A standard Zendesk theme needs nothing from you. A Marketplace theme needs a v4-ready version from whoever built it. A theme somebody wrote for you needs the code migrating, and the tool for that arrives in November. Ask pluscloud which of the three you are on if you are not sure.
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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