Organizing knowledge base content in categories and sections

Fastpath: Help Center or Guide Admin > Add button

You can organize your knowledge base content into categories and sections and manage the order of those categories and sections.

You must be a Guide Manager to add and edit sections and categories.

The article covers the following topics:

• About the Help Center content structure
• Adding a category to your knowledge base
• Adding a section to your knowledge base
• Editing categories or sections
• Deleting categories and sections
• Working with category and section drafts

Related articles:

• Moving sections and articles in the Help Center
• Reordering knowledge base content in the Help Center

About the Help Center content structure

All Help Center knowledge base content is organized in the following tree structure:

Home > Categories > Sections > Articles

Each article must be a child of a section, and each section must be child of a category. You can't have orphan articles or sections.

The Help Center must have at least one category. Think of categories as the top-level organizing containers of the Help Center. You can use categories as content portals for different products or services, or for different kinds of content. For example, you can create one category for tech notes and another category for case studies.

If you have only one category in your Help Center, then the category itself is hidden to end-users, and they see only the sections that are in your Help Center.

Adding a category to your knowledge base

Categories are the top-level organizing containers of the Help Center. Categories contain sections and sections contain articles. If you have only one category in your Help Center, then the category itself is hidden to end-users, and they see only the sections in your Help Center.

To add a category

1. In Help Center or Guide Admin, click Add in the top menu bar, then select Category.

   

2. Enter a Name and optional Description for your category.
3. (Guide Enterprise) In the sidebar, if you have multiple category templates in your live theme, click the Template menu, then select a template.

   If you do not select an alternate template, the default category template will be applied.

   

4. In the sidebar, ensure the correct Source language is selected.
5. Click Add.

   The category is created. Remember, if you have only one category, then the category itself is hidden to end-users, and they see only the sections that are in your Help Center.

   Tip: For information about how you can display a section in multiple categories, see Displaying an article or section in multiple sections or categories in our Support tech notes.

Adding a section to your knowledge base

Sections are collections of related articles. To add a section, you must have at least one category to act as its parent container. Permissions for viewing and managing aricles in a section is set at the article level, not the section level. 

If visibility for all the articles in a section is internal (Professional and Enterprise only), then the section will not be visible to end-users, but if one article in an internal section is visible to any end-users, then the section will become visible as well.

To add a section

1. In Help Center or Guide Admin, click Add in the top menu bar, then select Section.

   

2. Enter a Name and optional Description for your section.
3. (Guide Professional and Enterprise) In the sidebar, ensure the correct Source language is selected if you support multiple languages.
4. Under Show in category, select the category you'd like this section to appear in.
5. Under Order articles by, select an option for how you'd like articles to appear in this section.
6. (Guide Enterprise) If you have multiple section templates in your live theme, click the Template menu, then select a template.

   If you do not select an alternate template, the default section template will be applied.

7. Click Add.

   The section is created. Remember, if you have only one category, then the category itself is hidden to end-users, and users see only the sections that are in your Help Center.

   Tip: For information about how you can display a section in multiple categories, see Displaying an article or section in multiple sections or categories in our Support tech notes.

Editing categories or sections

You can change the properties of a category or section, including its title or description.

To edit a category or section

1. In Help Center, navigate to the category or section you want to edit, then click Edit category or Edit section in the top menu bar.

   

   Alternatively, in Guide Admin, click the Arrange content () icon in the sidebar, then click the title of the category or section to open it in edit mode.

2. Make your changes, then click Update.

Deleting categories and sections

When you delete a category, all the sections contained in the category are also deleted, and all the articles contained the sections are archived.

When you delete a section, all the articles contained in the section are archived.

To delete a category or section

1. In Help Center, navigate to the category or section you want to delete, then click Edit category or Edit section in the top menu bar.

   

   Alternatively, in Guide Admin, click the Arrange content () icon in the sidebar, then click the title of the category or section to open it in edit mode.
2. Click Delete in the bottom of the sidebar.
3. Confirm that you want to delete the category or section.

   You cannot recover deleted categories or sections. Any articles contained in a deleted section are archived. You can restore archived articles to another section if you need to.

Alternatively, to delete a category or section, you can click Articles > Arrange articles, then click the name of the category or section you want to delete (you'll have to expand a category to see its sections). In the edit page, click Delete in the bottom of the sidebar. If the edit page doesn't open when you click the name of the category or section from Arrange Articles, it is likely being blocked by a pop-up blocker.

Working with category and section drafts

If you create a category or section that is a work in progress, and want to restrict who can access it, you can mark it as a draft. Marking a category or section as a draft applies the draft status to any elements within it.

The steps for marking a newly-created category or section as a draft are slightly different than those for marking an existing category as a draft.

To mark a newly-created category or section as a draft

1. After completing the steps described in Adding a category to your knowledge base or Adding a section to your knowledge base, click the Mark as draft option in the sidebar.

   

2. Click Update at the top of the page.

To mark an existing category or section as a draft

1. Open the category or section in edit mode, as described in Editing categories and sections.
2. Click the Mark as draft option in the sidebar.
3. Click Update at the top of the page.

Categories and sections marked as drafts are not viewable by end-users, and can only be accessed by agents with manager permissions.

To see whether a category or section is marked as a draft

• Open the category or section in edit mode.
  • A category or section in draft mode is indicated by the Draft label at the top of the edit page:

    

  • A new section added to a category in draft mode displays a banner at the top of the page:

    

    When the category is published, the section is no longer in draft mode, and the banner is removed. However, if the section is manually marked as draft, it will remain in draft mode until the marker is removed.
  • A new article added to a section in draft mode is automatically saved as a draft, and cannot be viewed by end-users until the section or category it is in is published.