Lightning Bolt Solutions: Build Once, Then Distribute and Reuse

With Lightning Bolt, you can create and export industry-specific solutions to jump-start new communities or package and distribute them for others to use. Save time by building once and then reusing. Whether it’s for your own org or you’re a consulting partner or ISV, you can reduce the time required to build communities and cut development costs.

Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

You can take advantage of Lightning Bolt in several ways to save time and money. Here are just a few examples.

Example

Let’s say you customize Customer Service (Napili) to create a branded community with features that meet your particular business needs. You want to create several similar communities, but you don’t want to build each one from scratch. By exporting your customized solution, you can reuse it to build as many communities as you need.

Example

You’re a consulting partner who specializes in building communities for the real estate industry. With Lightning Bolt, you can build and export a real-estate-focused solution that’s easy to distribute to your customers. After the template is installed on your customer’s org, you can further customize it to suit their unique needs. By building the bulk of the solution in your org and then distributing it to your customers’ orgs, you can launch their communities in no time.

Example

Say you’re an ISV who builds a custom page and several custom Lightning components to create an e-commerce feature for use in Community Builder. Now you can bundle the page and its components into a single package and distribute it to your customers.

What’s a Lightning Bolt Solution?

At its simplest, a Lightning Bolt solution comprises a community template that’s made up of a theme layout and CSS, along with pages, content layouts, and Lightning components. Lightning Bolt solutions seamlessly integrate with Salesforce and incorporate business logic, custom objects and apps, industry best practices, and more.

Use the Customer Service (Napili) template as a base to build your custom solution with standard pages and components, or create custom pages, layouts, and components of your own. After you finish customizing the template, export the template or one of its pages from Settings | Developer to make it ready to use or distribute.

I Want to Reuse My Own Solution

When you export a template, it appears in the Community Creation wizard in your org, where you can use it to build new communities.

Similarly, you can export a single page, which includes the page’s content layout and components. After you export a page, it appears in the New Page dialog box in all communities in your org.

I Want to Package and Distribute Solutions

You can package solutions for distribution to your customers’ orgs. After you create and upload a managed package, share the link privately with your clients, customers, or partners. Alternatively, publish your custom Lightning Bolt solution as a managed package to AppExchange. Market your solution with an AppExchange listing in the same way you list any other app, component, or consulting service. Describe your solution, pricing, support, and other details so that customers can determine whether your offering is right for them.

The Packages area under Setup

When a template is installed from another org, it appears in the org’s Community Creation wizard. Installed pages appear in the New Page dialog box.

Lightning Communities Developer Guide

Lightning Bolt Solutions: Build Once, Then Distribute and Reuse

Example

Example

Example

What’s a Lightning Bolt Solution?

I Want to Reuse My Own Solution

I Want to Package and Distribute Solutions

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