Salesforce: Activities & Chatter component

When you edit the Lightning page of an object, in some scenarios, you may not find the standard Activities & Chatter components, why?

Activities
When I edit the Lightning page of a custom object, here what I see:

Activities component which is a standard component, but not available for this object. Why? In short, you need to enable the activity for that object.

Go to object manager, open that object, you will be landed at the Details page, and click the Edit button then select Allow Activities.

Once enabled, you should see the Activities component.

Chatter

Same with the Activities component, the Chatter component is also a standard component, and you may not see it too (see above screenshot), the same for Tab component, you may not see Chatter listed as a standard Tab label.

To enable Chatter for the object, you need to enable it from Setup > > Feed Tracking, looks for the object, and enable Feed Tracking, you are not required to select any fields for tracking, but you can select as needed.

Once saved, you should see the Chatter, Chatter Feed, and Chatter Publisher components in the lightning page app builder.

Feed Tracking

You may curious what is the purpose of selecting fields in the field tracking, which I said not required to show Chatter components?

Let's test how this works? Back to the Feed Tracking page and select that object, now select a few fields. For this blog, I am going to select Type and Industry.

Now, back to open the record, click the Edit button and change the Type and Industry, then save. Open Chatter component and now you should see the changes here.

Feed tracking is not the same as Field History Tracking, where we need to enable from object level, then set fields to track object manager. The fields enabled for tracking between feed tracking and field history tracking can be different.

Notes:

• Create a new record and populate fields enable for feed tracking, this action will NOT track under Chatter Feed -- same with Field History Tracking, fields will NOT be tracked on new record creation, Field History Tracking only track when the record is created and by who.
• Populate tracked fields from blank will be tracked in both Feed Tracking and Field History Tracking.
• Remove (make blank) on tracked fields from blank will be tracked in both Feed Tracking and Field History Tracking.

Feed Tracking

Field History Tracking