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.
-
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
Thanks, Mary.
Hi Mary!
I did some poking around in our Product Feedback forum but didn't find any posts that covered this particular use case. I'd encourage you to hop over there and create a post with your detailed use case. This gives other users the opportunity to add their vote and use case, and also ensures that our Product Managers see your suggestion.
Hi Jessie - Is there an easy method to produce a list of all article titles and their corresponding URL's ? Specifically a list that it easily exported or copied into a spreadsheet. I was hoping to have this for traffic reporting...something easy to use as a baseline / starting point for month to month traffic metrics. As far as I can see the only way is to manually compile a list - or work backwards from my analytics reporting which is somewhat cumbersome. Thanks!
the link "see also inserting videos" does not work FYI
Thanks, Jenna. Fixed it!
Hi,
I can't delete attachments in the edit mode, the "x" just doesn't work and nothing happens when I click it.
- Update -
Seems like it's okay right now :)
Hi Clement!
Thanks for updating; I'm glad it's working now!
Hey!
Is there a way to get a list of all the articles and their corresponding labels?
It seems like a lot of work to manually go through all the articles and copy / paste the labels which have been added to them.
Hi Daniel! I would recommend using the API to get this information (because I agree, copying and pasting would be awful). You can learn more about this at the following link:
https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/help_center/labels
I am hoping that we will not have to use the API to do something like this. I am not a programmer so when I need the report, I need someone else to create the query for me. I cannot sustain this.
Hey Mary!
Whether you'd need to use the API to get your data is going to depend on exactly what you're trying to do. If you can give us more detail about what you're working on, we can let you know for sure!
I have some ticket forms and I would like to create an article with some informations and also one of my forms. Is this possible?
Hey Bruno -
Welcome to the Zendesk Community.
I'm not clear on exactly what you're trying to accomplish - are you looking for a way to automatically generate a Knowledge Base article out of a ticket interaction?
Hi Nicole,
I'm trying to create an article to my users.
This article has some text information but the user also need to fill a form to send me some information.
I already have a form created on zendesk (ticket form) but I dont know how to create this article that has text and a form.
How should I do this?
Hi Bruno,
You can add a link to your ticket form in your article.
To do so, follow the instructions "to link directly to a ticket form in your Help Center" in this article.
Hope that helps!
Thanks, Jennifer!
Is there a way to version published articles? As we release updates to our product, we need to update our customer facing content. We would love a way to be able to write a new version of the article and publish it on the day of release, rather than having to copy and past content from other source into the articles on the day of our release. As far as I can tell, I can edit the article and save as draft, but that leaves the content unavailable in the meantime. Am I just not seeing the option?
Erik,
We have that same need. I have a document that is published. I want to update it a few days before I republish. But, there is no way to do that. So, I have to wait until the date of publishing to make the changes. Would be nice to be able to edit a published articles and save the changes without publishing those changes.
Erik, you're right. As Mary said, there's no way to stage an updated version of a live article (except as a draft or an article in a restricted section that you copy/paste from when you're ready).
One thought I had the other day is that you could publish the updated version for a quick second, then revert to the previously live (current) version. Then, when you are ready to publish the update, you "revert" to that version. Does that make sense?
I know it's not ideal, but my coworker and I did discuss it as a possible way to use article revisions to stage content.
Good to know that. Does it let you know in any way that the most current update is not published? There should be some identifier within the article that should let you know an earlier version is published and the current version is not. This helps you check on these types of articles so they dont get "forgotten"
Hi Mary,
No, you'd be using the article revisions feature for this little "staging" trick. So they wouldn't be any special indicators on the articles. You'd just have to know.
So in this screenshot, the version at the bottom and the version at the top would be the same version (the "current" version). And the one in the middle is the "updated" version ready for you make live when you are ready.
To add to Jennifer's suggestion, if your temporary work in progress version has a top line like "In revision (Work in progress)" then it would be easier for you to identify, and also if a customer did stumble upon it in the brief moment when it was visible, they would be less likely to be confused / annoyed by any discrepancies.
I guess that could be a work around. But a built-in indicator would be more reliable to show the article was updated but not published (like a red dot or something). This way it is clearly visible. We cannot rely on people always added "In Progress" to the title or top line. That text could end up getting published by mistake. Workarounds should eventually be built-in to product.
But it can be considered in the meantime.
Right, but this whole approach is a workaround anyway. It's well-known (by us users and by Zendesk) that there needs to be a clear mechanism for saving revisions in progress.
So true, Jonathan.
We are definitely working on a built-in feature. And it is not too, crazy far away (from beta at least). So that's good news!
Stay tuned, Mary.
Thank you, Jennifer. Knowing these types of enhancements & features are coming is very positive.
I will definitely keep you in mind for when the beta starts and let you know, Mary!
In this article I think "Inserting videos" hyperlink is not working. Please check it.. if it is working, ignore my comment.
Thanks and regards
Atul Verma
Thanks for the heads-up, Atul! I'll let our Documentation team know. :)
Its fixed now. Thanks for letting us know, Atul!
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