This post is... well over a year late, but there's still a new(ish?) member of the Power Pages family that could use some more love. Hello Modern Community!

Wasn't there already a community template?

The Dynamics 365 Customer Self-Service portal was released several years ago as an efficient solution for offering customers the ability to open their own cases, proactively resolve issues by browsing through a Knowledge Base, submit ideas, and collaborate through discussion forums.

Managing the forums, posts, and responses are handled through a Community section within the familiar Portal Management model-driven app. While a valuable feature of the template, discussion forums are not the focus of this template, though there is the ability to make posts in forums and subscribe. Instead, the Customer Self-Service portal is meant for broader self-service use cases, but that is not our focus for today. 

Modern Community

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community is a more recent addition to the Dynamics 365 Service family. Leveraging this template rather than the Customer Self-Service template would be for scenarios where the focus is purely on ideation, and the forums here are optimized to help organizations collect + respond to ideas, feedback, and suggestions.

Deployment

Community encompasses a Power Pages website and a model-driven app for configuration. Installing the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community app is a prerequisite to deploying a Modern Community website. Steps to do so can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/community-overview.

Installing the Dynamics 365 Customer Community app installs the Community Base solution which has the tables used for the Forums -

Note that these forum tables are different from the Dynamics 365 Customer Self-Service website's forum tables - these are installed with the Dynamics 365 Portals - Discussion Forums solution that is installed when Customer Self-Service template is deployed. If your organization has both types of Pages websites, you can differentiate between the tables by checking the schema prefix - the Self-Service solution still has the adx_ prefix, whereas Modern Community has the msdyn_ prefix.

Deploying the Power Pages website then deploys the website itself and installs the familiar Portal Management model-driven app if your environment does not already have it.

Page architecture

The Modern Community template is structured slightly differently than we are generally accustomed to with other Pages websites… Making customizations via the Power Pages Studio or the VSCode integration will not work. The community page will load in the Studio, but it is not clickable - loading this in VSCode renders as blank. Why?

Most Pages web pages use Web Templates that outline the structure of the web page using HTML and Liquid-- a markup language that allows developers to create dynamic web pages using tags and filters. These templates allow developers to customize the look and feel of the Pages website. Web pages that do not use Web Templates instead are Page Templates and contain Rewrite Urls instead of html/liquid content. The Rewrite URL points to an .aspx page -- these pages use ASP.NET and are executed server side. This means that developers cannot see or access the source code that controls the UI of these pages.

The only two Web Pages that this template contains are Home and Community. When navigating to the Modern Community website, the Home page immediately redirects to the Community page that contains the rewrite URL to the .aspx page.

Now this brings us full circle - as a Modern Community website consists of the one .aspx page whose source code exists on the server, developers cannot use Pages Studio to modify the UI.

What is customizable 

The majority of configurations that are going to be made to the Modern Community website will occur within the Community model-driven app. This is where Community configurations are made, such as for the forums and their properties or managing collections of ideas, 

The Website Settings table contains a single configuration record called Default Website Settings. This table contains the customizable attributes of the template: Primary Color, Background Color, and Text Color. These values are set to blank by default, but can be populated with a hex code.

Text elements for the website's template are stored in Content Snippets (yay for something familiar!), which are accessible via Portal Management. Unlike other templates, other supported languages are already activated, so filtering by language is advised here. Once the correct snippet has been identified, simply modify its Value.

Resources

• Overview of Community | Microsoft Learn
• Power Pages: How a Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect can help

Skylar Shonblom