Deploying Communities with Blue Canvas

Enabling Community deployments

You need to enable the ExperienceBundle metadata type and contact us to enable SiteDotCom.

To enable the ExperienceBundle metadata type, from Setup, enter Communities Settings in the Quick Find box, and then select Communities Settings. Select Enable ExperienceBundle Metadata API, and save your changes.
Contact Blue Canvas customer support to enable community tracking in your account.

Deploying Communities

When you deploy communities, we recommend you select the SiteDotCom file instead of the ExperienceBundle, since we found it to be better supported by Salesforce. When deploying an Experience Builder site with ExperienceBundle, ensure that the SiteDotCom type isn’t included in the manifest file.

Types of Communities

Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce Communities

Classic communities are based on the Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce structure. We will import the first version of the .site file and update it every time we detect changes to the Experience Bundle.

This type of community is also known as ChatterNetwork.

Example File Names	Metadata Type	Description
networkBranding/cbHelp_Center.networkBranding	NetworkBranding	Represents the branding and color scheme applied to the login pages of a classic community. For branding properties that apply to Lightning communities, see BrandingSet.
siteDotComSites/Help_Center1.site siteDotComSites/Help_Center1.site-meta.xml	SiteDotCom	Contains the community site layout in a proprietary binary file format.

Lightning Communities

Lightning communities are built with the Experience Builder. This type of community is also known as ChatterNetworkPicasso.

Example File Names	Metadata Type	Description
networks/Help Center.network-meta.xml	Network	Represents a Lightning or classic community. Contains administration settings, such as page override, email, and membership configurations.
sites/Help_Center.site-meta.xml	CustomSite	Contains the domain and page setting information for a Lightning or classic community.
experiences/Help_Center1/ experiences/Help_Center1.site-meta.xml	ExperienceBundle	Represents a text-based code structure of Lightning community settings and site components, such as pages, branding sets, and themes. The Enable ExperienceBundle Metadata API setting must be enabled.
navigationMenus/Default_Navigation.navigationMenu-meta.xml	NavigationMenu	Navigation menus are available only in communities created using the Customer Service template.
managedTopics/Help Center.managedTopics-meta.xml	ManagedTopics	Represents the navigational, content, and featured topics in a Lightning community, as configured per Content Management > Topics.
brandingSets/	BrandingSet	Represents the definition of a set of branding properties for a Lightning community, as defined in the Theme panel in Experience Builder.
userCriteria/Help Center.Customer_Members.userCriteria
moderation/Help Center.Banned.keywords moderation/Help Center.Block_banned_keywords.rule
audience/Default_Help Center.audience

Aloha Communities

App launcher communities based on the Aloha structure are not supported and may interfere with the deployment of other communities.

ExperienceBundle Metadata API doesn't support the template of Aloha1.

Note on renaming communities

When a community is first created in any org, it uses the naming convention <Community_Name>1. However, if renamed later, the naming convention is changed to <Community_Name>_C. This naming convention mismatch may cause errors when comparing and deploying ExperienceBundles.

To work around this problem, make sure that you rename the community on all source and target orgs. If the name is already the same, temporarily use a different name and rename it back.

For more information, see Salesforce Known Issue: Deploying change set containing community fails with error.