Guide admins can create new articles and edit all existing articles in the knowledge base. Agents who are not Guide admins can create and edit articles if they have management permissions. End-users can't contribute articles to the knowledge base.
You must have at least one section in the knowledge base before you can start adding articles. When you create an article, you must assign it to a section. For more information, see Anatomy of the Help Center.
Adding articles to the knowledge base
Guide admins can create new articles. Agents can create new articles if they have management permissions. Agent privileges for new articles vary depending on their management permissions. See the complete list of agent privileges for existing, published articles.
You can create a maximum of 40,000 total articles, including translations. This limit includes articles in all states, except archived.
To add an article to the knowledge base
- In Help Center or Guide, click Add in the top menu bar, then select Article.
- Enter your content.
- Use the article editor's toolbar for formatting options or to add links, images, or tables. This toolbar is not the same as the toolbar in community posts.
For information, see the Help Center article editor toolbar reference. See also Inserting links, Inserting images, and Inserting videos. For tables, check out this formatting tip.
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Edit the HTML source by clicking the Source Code button at the end of the editor's toolbar.
Note: Help Center quarantines unsafe HTML tags and attributes to reduce the risk of malicious code. For information, see Allowing unsafe HTML in pages.
- Use the article editor's toolbar for formatting options or to add links, images, or tables. This toolbar is not the same as the toolbar in community posts.
- Under Managed By, click the drop-down arrow, then select management permissions to determine which agents have editing and publishing rights for this article.
- Managers enables only Guide admins to edit and publish the article. This option is selected by default on new articles.
- Editors and publishers (Enterprise only) enables all agents and admins to edit this article but only admins can publish the article. This option appears only if it's been activated.
- Custom management permission (Professional and Enterprise) enables specific user segments to edit and publish the article.
Depending on your account, you might also see an agents and managers option.
Guide admin can apply any management permissions. Agents with management permissions can apply only the management permissions they belong to. Agents who do not have management permissions on any article will not see this option, and the management permissions will default to managers.
- Under Visible to, select one of the view permissions options to determine which users can view this article.
- Visible to everyone includes anyone who visits Help Center and does not require sign in.
- Signed-in users includes internal and external users who create an account and sign in to your Help Center.
- Agents and admins (Professional and Enterprise) includes staff members only, so that you can create content that is internal-only.
- Custom user segment (Professional and Enterprise) enables you to restrict viewing access to specific users based on tags, organizations, or groups by applying custom user segments (see Creating user segments to restrict access).
Guide admins and agents with publishing permissions can set view permissions for articles. Agents who do not have publish permissions on any article will not see this option, and the view permissions will default to agents and managers.
- Under Publish in section, click Select a section, then select a new section and click Ok.
You can search for or navigate to the section. All of your categories might not appear in the window. To navigate, click the expander arrows to drill down to the section you want.
- Chose any of the following options:
- To close the article for comments, deselect Open for comments.
- To promote the article in its section, select Promote article.
- To add an attachment, click Upload attachment on the lower side of the editor.
The file size limit is 20 MB. You can remove an attachment by clicking the x next to it.
- (Guide Professional and Enterprise) Under Labels, add any labels you want.
As you start typing, a list of existing labels appears for you to chose from, or you can add a new keyword by selecting Add as a new label or by typing a word and pressing Enter.
For more information about using labels and best practices, see Using labels on Help Center articles.
You can add labels to the default language article only and not to translations of the article. You can add labels in multiple languages to the default article.
- (Guide Enterprise) Under Template, if you have multiple article templates in your live theme, click the drop-down, then select a template.
You might have to scroll down to see this option. If you do not select an alternate template, the default article template will be applied.
- When you are finished working on your article, do one of the following:
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish later, click Save.
Clicking Save creates the article as a draft (Guide Lite and Professional) or a work in progress (Guide Enterprise).
Click the Preview in Help Center link (Guide Lite and Professional) or the Preview link (Guide Enterprise) to view the article in your Help Center. The preview link expires after one hour.
- To publish your new article, click the drop-down arrow on the Save button, then select Publish now.
Clicking Publish now creates the article and publishes it in your Help Center.
Click the Show in Help Center link (Guide Lite and Professional) or the Published link (Guide Enterprise) to view the article in your Help Center.
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish later, click Save.
Editing articles in the knowledge base
Guide admins can edit any articles. Agents can edit existing articles where they have management permissions. Agent privileges for existing articles vary depending on their management permissions. See the complete list of agent privileges for existing, published articles.
On Guide Lite and Professional, you cannot save edits for an existing published article. On Guide Enterprise, you can save edits for an existing published article as a work in progress.
There are some article updates that you can make on multiple articles in bulk. For more information, see Updating knowledge base articles in bulk.
- In Help Center, navigate to the article you want to edit, then click Edit article in the top menu bar.
- In Guide Admin, click the Manage articles (
) icon in the sidebar, search for the article, then click the title to open it.
- In Guide Admin, click the Arrange content (
) icon in the sidebar, navigate to the article, then click the options menu at the end of the title and select Edit article.
81 Comments
I wanted to piggy back on something @Tommer mentioned: adding references to other KB articles.
I understand the usage of anchor links, but I was wondering if Zendesk has the ability to suggest KB articles, or if there's a nice option to link to them by selecting from a dropdown somewhere?
Hi Will!
We have a "related articles" component available in the Help Center, which you can find out more about here: Help Center template component reference.
This doesn't allow you to select which articles are related to others, so it might not be the right solution for you, but it does take into consideration the articles your users have viewed prior to the article in question, and over time the traffic patterns in your Help Center will naturally build up those relationships for you and show relevant related articles to your users.
Do you think that would help?
@Jessie,
That certainly seems like a step up from at least not having anything. There wouldn't happen to be any way to modify the "relatedness" of articles? Possibly through the API even?? I would just hate for users to casually browse the KB, and have completely unrelated articles end up becoming related.
Thanks for the reply! =)
How do I setup an internal knowledgebase? I am trailing the Plus plan from our starter plan. The use of an internal KB would be very useful to us but I can't work out how to set that up.
Hey Merethe!
The Internal KB feature is available on the Plus and Enterprise plan, so this will definitely be available to you while you're trying out the Plus plan!
The process is actually super simple. In the Help Center KB, content is restricted at the Section level. All the articles in restricted Sections will, of course, be restricted. If all the Sections in a Category are restricted, then that Category will only appear to those users that have access to the content. (Clear as mud? :D)
When you create your iKB sections, you'll see there's a column on the right-hand side of the screen. This is where you'll arrange all your section settings, and you'll create iKB sections by selecting Agents and Managers from the Who can view drop down menu:
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
I may have missed it, but I don't see clearly specified the relationship between org restriction and tag restriction. We want users to see the article who have the specified tag OR who are in the specified orgs. Is this how it works? Thanks.
@RA Admin
You are correct. The Organization Field does also have approximately a 1000 character limit.
Hi, we are looking to use Zendesk to replace our Wiki environment. We have a lot of end users registered to whom we would like to grant access to build the knowledge base. Is there anything we can do besides changing all of their roles to light-agent?
Hi Adrian!
Making end-users into light agents would give them access to your tickets so I would strongly advise against going that route.
The Zendesk Help Center isn't built for wiki-style co-authoring/editing functionality. My best suggestion would be to use software that's built for that particular type of community, and use Zendesk for your ticketing and any other traditional documentation you might need.
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Thanks Jessie
Is there a way to upload a video? The video (a demo on how to use Help Center for our signed-in Users) does not exist on a third party video hosting site for security reasons. Help? :)
Hi @Jennifer! It sounds like a better option would be for you to add the video as an asset in your Help Center, which can then be referenced in your article. Once you have uploaded the asset, you will add code into the HTML like the following:
<iframe src="//p5.zdassets.com/hc/theme_assets/812413/223468737/videoname.mp4" width="500" height="350" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
This code will reference the asset link provided when you upload your video. Of course you can modify any of the details in the link as needed. I hope this works for you!
Hi there,
Is there a way to add multiple labels at once, starting from copying a list of keywords form a text file, for example?
Hi Andrea!
If you copy/paste a string into the label box, it'll be read as a single label because labels can have multiple words separated by a space. However, once you've added labels to an article, all those labels will show up in a handy drop-down box the text time you click inside the label field. This way you can quickly click the articles you want to add, instead of having to type them out every time you need them.
Hopefully that helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi Jessie, and thanks for the reply.
My goal is to populate the 'labels' field with several words, in different languages, at once, whenever I create an article. It is a matter of SEO, in fact.
I know that there is a script, which can be used if you have developers' permissions, and I am going to discuss this with ours.
But I like to solve problems efficiently :) and I am seeking for a quicker solution.
I have tried to use tab and comma separated list of word, but still they will be recognized as single string, which seems quite a big limitation, since Zendesk default search engine is poor: it looks for result corresponding to single words and completely neglect a whole phrase, since it splits it in single terms.
I hope this helps clarifying.
Cheers.
We ended up using the code below. The video is embedded in a <video> tag instead of an <iframe>. Although <iframe> worked, it caused the video to autoplay. Using the <video> tag instead prevented autoplaying of the video.
<video src="//p9.zdassets.com/hc/theme_assets/videonamehere.mp4" controls width="500" height="350"></video>
Hi Jennifer!
Thanks so much for sharing your solution. :)
Hi Andrea!
I wish I had a better solution to this issue for you. I'd suggestion popping over to our Product Feedback Forum and posting your suggestion there, along with your detailed use case.
Posting in that forum will ensure that our Product Managers see your feedback, and will give other users the opportunity to upvote your suggestion and add their own voice to the discussion. Our PMs take this type of feedback into consideration when establishing our road map, and a detailed explanation of your use case helps them to understand the problem that you need solved.
Thanks for your feedback!
Is there a way to prevent end users from being able to copy the embedded code for videos?
Chris-
The only means available for end users to access the code of the Help Center would be using the Developer Console in Google Chrome or another browser, for example. Or some other tool that renders web page code to be accessible.
There is no means to block the Developer Console of browsers from accessing the code of the web page. This is something outside of Help Center that is true for all web pages rendered in browsers that have these Consoles.
Is it possible for end users to be able to search by author?
Hi Carolyn!
Help Center only searches the text of articles, not user profiles, so unless that author's name appears in the body of an article it won't show up in search results.
However, with our new User Profile feature for Help Center, your end-users can follow a specific user so they get notified when that person makes a contribution to your Help Center. They can also view a list of that user's contributions right from their profile:
Hope that helps!
Hi,
Is there any way to tag content in an article so that it doesn't display? I have an existing topic that needs to be updated in a few weeks but if I change the topic to "Draft" it won't show up now. In RoboHelp you can add content then tag it and when you generate, it will exclude the tagged content. If you do not have a feature like this any plans on adding one in the future?
Hi Rachelle,
We don't have a feature to mark portions of an article as draft, but you can temporarily hide any part of an article with the HTML comment tag, <!-- text -->, in the article's Code view.
Example:
<p>This is a paragraph.</a>
<!-- <p>This is a draft paragraph.</p> -->
Only the first paragraph will appear. You can use the comment tags anywhere, including at the word level. When you're ready to make the content public, just remove the tags.
Charles thanks for the quick reply. This is extremely helpful. I will try this out.
Are there plans to allow Support staff to have access to view a list of their own content and the state the content is in (Draft or Published)? Right now they can get a list but it does not show the state of the article.
Mary
I hope I can help you here. Under Articles>Manage Articles, there is a little traffic light on the left hand side indicating the article status.
Yellow for draft and green for published.
Hi. Yes I have seen that. However, Support Engineers do not have Manage Articles permission. So once they save a document the only way to see the docs they created is to go to their profile and click on Help Center. That view only shows the article Title, Section, Created date. It does not show the status.
Further, we use labels to simulate an article going into a technical review Queue, quality review Queue, or archive. There is no way to see if an article has that label (as is in the simulated "queue").
There should be a simple way to customize the view and add columns to show what is needed.
Mary
Thanks for that explanation. That sounds reasonable to me.
I guess including some temporary text in the article title could help, but not very satisfactory.
No since those articles are customer facing. The best solution, is to allow agents to customize their view by adding what columns of info they need to see.
Or, allow manage articles to agents so they can create filters to find particular documents. Manage articles should be a right for all users. Separate from the other Admin tasks of Arranging articles, adding sections & categories.
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