Frustrated at widgets and UI options

Hi ​@dandre - can you put your audiences into groups? Catalog widgets have a neat capability. You can show to the appropriate group just their assigned catalog with a single widget.

By the way with some CSS - you can remove the search bar…page by page as necessary.

Groups are possible and might solve some of the requirement, but I can’t see that capability you mention. The widget options don’t appear to have group options, or are you saying the catalog is assigned to the group, and based on their group membership they will see specific catalogs?

I can also ride a Bicycle from New York to LA, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

Sorry for my sarcasm ;). I’m frustrated as that should be checkbox on the widget, not requiring developer-level CSS capabilities. I know enough about CSS to be dangerous. I did not expect to require CSS skills on my team to perform basic customization.

Hi - For catalogs, you can grant specific groups permissions to see these when you create the catalog itself.  Then, if you create a page that pulls multiple catalogs in, your learners will only see the catalogs they have permissions to see - this is where groups can help.  For example, let’s say you create a page, and it contains 3 catalogs.  Then you have a learner who is part of a group, and that group has access to only 2 of the 3 catalogs on that page.  When that learner navigates to your catalog page, they should only see the two catalogs they have been granted permissions to see.  

Hope that helps!

I agree with this frustration.  I took a peek at the ad you linked, and all of their examples are super heavily coded.  It’s great that it’s possible, but it shouldn’t be required or should have heavy disclaimers.  One thing that I’ve noticed is that Docebo is very quick to suggest/highlight parterships with their associate businesses who specialize in doing this coding and customizing Docebo for you, but of course that is at additional cost with yet another contract.

After a lot of trial and error and research, I’ve been able to get our system to a state that I’m happy with over time. It looks like the reply above gave a good rundown on how you can display certain catalogs only to certain groups - utilizing Additional Fields in the Users area to assist with your groups if you need extra data to create them will be your friend.

Although it shouldn’t be necessary, I will also say I have found a lot of very helpful CSS/HTML coding posted here in the community that has helped tremendously with resolving a few of my painpoints.  I have tons of posts bookmarked on certain coding or processes that have already been “resolved/solved” by end-users of the system, and have been really grateful that those individuals shared the fruits of their labor! 

I share the same frustrations and am a new customer in the set up process. We are only using it for internal learning. We are a global company with the same product lines in various locations and I need for admins adding content I need to be able to distinguish which product catalog to put things in for which location. Without a folder organization in the catalogs it is a mess! So I was thinking to avoid that and only use Channels, but was recently told that even if I have channels made visible to certain groups I still have to make the content available to the audience. Somehow our old archaic system makes more sense. I would love to know more about how large companies are managing . . . without creating pages upon pages.

I do get where you’re coming from, ​@dandre, and I fully agree that it’s just slimy and gross of Docebo to advertise and sell using such highly customized examples without disclosing the additional investment required.

That said, I’m a big defender of custom CSS as a solution for the aesthetic needs you mentioned (e.g. re: icons). Support for custom CSS is so much more powerful and flexible than anything else Docebo could build, so I’d prefer to see them focus their efforts elsewhere (such as refactoring Catalog management).

Catalogs have codes already which are basically for internal admin purposes only. But the legacy UI for managing them doesn’t even display them, much less let you filter for them. And that is deeply problematic for the reasons you outline: to offer a better, more contextual experience, you basically need lots of catalogs for lots of different groups. Which in turn creates issues both for admins and users. Widgets could indeed use more options in terms of what is presented and how it can be filtered (you can’t fix filtering with CSS). Perhaps the most concerning thing about it from my perspective is that I don’t see a single catalog-related improvement anywhere on the roadmap.

In terms of a workaround, I might have one for you, but I can already tell that you’ll hate it. 😬 It involves a lot of additional expense and technical configuration. But in a nutshell, it’s possible to build your own solution for managing catalogs via Docebo’s APIs. It’s not entirely theoretical, in that I did build something like this in my previous job, using Airtable + Docebo Connect. But yeah, a fair bit of work + moolah, and if a bit of custom CSS is already painful for your team, then this is probably a non-starter.