A Salesforce Guide Hub: The Complete Picture
Series: Build a Salesforce Guide App with AI
Page: 1 of 10
Time to complete: 5 minutes (reading only)
Prerequisites: None — start here if you want to understand the app before committing to the build
The Problem
Every Salesforce team has the same problem. People get trained once, then forget. Process documentation lives in SharePoint or Confluence — somewhere outside Salesforce, somewhere nobody looks when they’re actually in the middle of doing something. New starters ask the same questions over and over. Bad habits spread because the right way to do something isn’t visible at the moment someone needs it.
The standard Salesforce answer is Knowledge Articles or In-App Guidance. But Knowledge requires a licence. In-App Guidance is limited and hard to maintain. Neither puts rich, searchable, video-capable help content exactly where people are working.
Guide Hub is a custom-built alternative that costs nothing beyond the time to build it.
What the Finished App Looks Like
The Guide Library
A searchable, filterable card grid of all published guides. Users can search by keyword, filter by category, and see read time and helpful vote counts on each card. Knowledge articles with a special checkbox ticked appear here too, with a distinct blue badge.
The Article View
A clean reading experience — no Salesforce record fields, no related lists, just the guide content. Rich text, videos (YouTube, Vimeo, external links, or Salesforce Files), a metadata sidebar showing category, helpful count, and topics. A “Was this helpful?” vote button that tracks anonymously.
The Guide Editor
A form for admins to author guides. Rich text body, topic tagging, video management, audience selection (User or Admin), and a draft/submit workflow that feeds into an approval process.
The Contextual Sidebar
On Account, Opportunity, and Case record pages, a sidebar panel shows guides relevant to that object type. Automatically populated based on how guides are tagged — no configuration needed per record.
The Quick Action Modal
An “Open Guides” button in the action bar on record pages. Opens a modal with two tabs: guides about that specific object type, and guides about general Salesforce functionality like list views and reports.
The Standalone Article Page
A clean Lightning App Page that renders a single guide or Knowledge article. Used when opening guides from the sidebar or modal — so users see only the content, not the record fields behind it.
The Admin Guide Library
A separate library visible only to admins. For internal documentation about how Salesforce is configured, how to manage users, how approval processes work. Admin guides publish directly without going through the approval queue.
How AI Fits In
This entire app was built using Claude as a coding assistant. Here’s the honest breakdown of what AI did and didn’t do:
What AI did well:
- Generated all Apex code from plain English descriptions of what each method should do
- Generated all LWC component HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
- Diagnosed errors from terminal output and suggested specific fixes
- Explained architectural decisions and tradeoffs when asked
- Adapted code quickly when requirements changed
What required human judgment:
- Deciding the overall architecture (one service class vs multiple, which objects to create)
- All Setup UI work — creating objects, fields, approval processes, permission sets
- Deciding what the app should do before asking AI to build it
- Recognising when AI’s suggestion was wrong and pushing back
What AI got wrong and had to be corrected:
- Invalid SOQL syntax (bind variables on the wrong side of a comparison)
- Reserved words used as variable names (
descis a keyword in SOQL) - Incorrect assumptions about how Salesforce passes parameters between Lightning pages
- Knowledge article field names that differ between orgs
This is a realistic picture of AI-assisted development. It’s not magic. It’s a fast, capable collaborator that needs direction, catches a lot of errors early, and occasionally confidently produces something broken. The tutorial shows all of this — including the fixes.
What You’ll End Up With
By the end of this series you’ll have:
- A fully working Guide Hub app deployed in your org
- A library of reusable Apex and LWC patterns you can adapt for other projects
- A solid understanding of how to use Claude effectively for Salesforce development
- A set of prompting strategies that transfer to any future build
The Series at a Glance
| Page | What you build | Approach |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Development environment | Manual install |
| 1 | Understanding the app | Reading |
| 2 | Data model + custom objects | AI design → manual Setup |
| 3 | Approval process | Manual Setup |
| 4 | Apex service layer | AI-generated code |
| 5 | Core LWC components | AI-generated code |
| 6 | Lightning App + first test | Manual Setup |
| 7 | Sidebar + quick action modal | AI-generated code + Setup |
| 8 | Video support | AI-generated code + Setup |
| 9 | Permission sets + security model | Manual Setup + AI code |
| 10 | Knowledge integration + polish | AI-generated code |
Before You Start Building
You need a Salesforce org to build in. A free Trailhead Developer Edition org is perfect for this — it has all the features you need and nothing to break.
Get one at developer.salesforce.com/signup.
You also need a Claude account at claude.ai. The free tier is sufficient for this tutorial, though the Pro tier gives you longer conversations which helps when working through larger phases.
Ready? Head to Page 2.