The Templating API is what’s used to render Help Center themes within Zendesk Guide. This includes the rendering of the Curlybars templating language in the theme templates, CSS and JavaScript files and the manifest file.
Earlier this year, Zendesk annnounced that a new version was being released, which promised to improve the performance, security and accessibility of themes. It also allows Zendesk to iterate more quickly in order to improve the Guide theming experience and makes it easier for developers to keep up with changes and feature releases coming from Zendesk.
“The latest version of the templating API offers performance, security and accessibility advantages to theme developers.”
Some of the changes include optimizing the way that certain out-of-box libraries are loaded and entirely removing some others. Two of the most important changes are the removal of the slow and bloated jQuery library and the font families used for icons (which many developers didn’t use but couldn’t avoid loading). The latter allows for more modern approaches, like inline SVG icons, to be used, giving developers more choice and customers a much better experience.
The Zendesk themes from Zenplates that we have featured are all built using the latest version of the Zendesk templating API and therefore benefit from all of the advantages described above.