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:
- 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:
Adding a category to your knowledge base
Categories are the top-level organizing containers of the Help Center. Categories contain sections. The Help Center must have at least one category. 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.
For more information, see About the Help Center knowledge base structure.
To add a category
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, click Add in the top menu bar, then select Category.
- Enter a Name and optional Description for your category.
- (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.
- In the sidebar, ensure the correct Source language is selected.
- 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. On Guide Lite and Professional, each section must be child of a category. On Guide Enterprise, a section can be a child of a category or a section.
Permissions for viewing and managing articles in a section are 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
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, click Add in the top menu bar, then select Section.
- Enter a Name and optional Description for your section.
- (Guide Professional and Enterprise) Ensure the correct Source language is selected if you support multiple languages.
- Under Order articles by, select an option for how you'd like articles to appear in this section.
If you select to manually order of articles, see Manually changing the order of articles to change the order of your articles.
- Under Hierarchy, click in the field, then select where you'd like this section to appear in your Help Center.
On Guide Lite and Professional, you must select a category as the parent for this section. Sections cannot contain sections.
On Guide Enterprise, you can select a category or a section as the parent for this section. You can nest sections in sections for a maximum of five section levels, with up to 20 sections in a section.
- (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.
- 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, do one of the following:
- In Help Center, navigate to the category or section you want to edit, then click Edit section in the top menu bar.
- In Guide Admin, click the Arrange content (
) icon in the sidebar and drill down to the category or section you want to edit. Click the options menu at the end of the section title, then select Edit category or Edit section.
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
- Do one of the following to edit the category or section you want to delete:
- In Help Center, navigate to the category or section you want to delete, then click Edit section in the top menu bar.
- In Guide Admin, click the Arrange content (
) icon in the sidebar and drill down to the category or section you want to delete. Click the options menu at the end of the section title, then select Edit category or Edit section.
- In Help Center, navigate to the category or section you want to delete, then click Edit section in the top menu bar.
- Click Delete in the bottom of the sidebar.
- 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
- Create and save a new section or category, as described in Adding a category to your knowledge base or Adding a section to your knowledge base.
The section or category is created and remains open for editing.
- Click the Mark as draft option in the sidebar.
- Click Update at the top of the page.
To mark an existing category or section as a draft
- Open the category or section in edit mode, as described in Editing categories and sections.
- Click the Mark as draft option in the sidebar.
- 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 Guide Managers.
To determine whether a category or section is marked as a draft
- Open the category or section in edit mode, as described in Editing categories and sections.
- An existing category or section in draft mode 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.
- An existing category or section in draft mode section in draft mode is indicated by the Draft label at the top of the edit page:
91 Comments
Hi
Is it possible to set an automation so that a ticket's comment or resolution do updates the knowledge base too? Thanks.
Hey Marcello!
Have you had a chance to look at our Knowledge Capture App? I think this may do what you're looking for!
Thanks Jess
I will look into this.
Have a quick question about Promoted articles. We show the promoted articles on the home page and it shows all promoted articles. Is it possible to show promoted articles on the Category page, but only the promoted articles in that category? So the home page shows all promoted articles, but if you click on 'Billing' then you would see the category and only the promoted articles within the category billing in the promoted section.
Hey Ed!
I suspect that this is something you could do with some clever JS coding, but that's about as far as my knowledge goes...we've got several fabulous coding gurus among our Community Moderators, so I'll see if they can confirm!
Hi @Ed Ball,
Copy and paste this code at the bottom of your category template -
Let us know if you face any issue.
Hi,
This worked great... thanks a ton!
I am using a Category in the KB for Notifications about Service Incidents and publication of post mortems. I do not want these articles to show up in search, and definitely not be included in the answer bot.
Is there any way of organizing the KB to have a "corner" where search does not look?
Hey Joar -
What you'll need to do is restrict access to that section of your Knowledge Base. Google won't index something that's restricted. The following article explains how to set up those restrictions:
Applying user segments to restrict access to Help Center Knowledge Base content
Restricting that content will also prevent Answer Bot from serving it up to anyone who doesn't have access to that section. It will serve it to people who have access to that section, though.
Hi,
On my Guide homepage, how can I display the 'top articles' instead of the 'recent activity' ?
(I am on lite plan)
Similar to this: https://help.zoosk.com/hc/en-us
Thanks
Hi Mat!
I believe I answered this question for you over here. Let us know if you need anything else!
Apologies if I missed this somewhere but is it possible to have the articles in a category "smart order" themselves in a way? So articles in a category order themselves based on those that are most popular/clicked on first?
Hello. What should I change in the CSS or category_page.hbs to reduce the max number of articles to 3 (from 6) ?
Hi @Niclas Kårlin,
Use the below code -
Let us know if you face any issue.
Team Diziana
Hi Caroline!
There's no in-built functionality that will do this. It might be possible to rig up something custom with JS...perhaps one of our coding gurus here in the Community can weigh in on that.
Trapta and Team Diziana,
I imported a bunch of documents to the "System Manager" section using API, and now only three documents show, but not the Show more... button.
https://support.ndcsolutions.com/hc/en-us/categories/115000762065-Documents-NDC8-Online-
Could you please take a look? Do you need login, let me know.
@Niclas Kårlin,
Apologies for the delay in response. Please make sure that the show more link is available there. As you have mentioned that you are using API, I have a doubt that the show more link will no longer be available once you will dump the list in the DOM.
Let me know if you face any issue.
Team Diziana
Hi @Trapta, now it doesn't work at all... All sections have the default six articles and the usual "See all 20 articles" text.
Hi Niclas! I'm checking with Trapta to see if she can help with this. Stand by!
Hi @Niclas,
I need to look at your help center to help you with this issue. I see that your help center is closed for end users. Can you make me log in?
Team Diziana
Sure, please make a ticket from this comment and we'll exchange email addresses there.
Hi,
Is there a limit as to how many categories you can have? We'd like 9/10 on our homepage. Thanks.
@Niclas, you can create a ticket here https://moderatortrapta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us and then we can exchange email addresses there.
Thanks
Hi @Lindsay,
You can use {{#is}} helper to hide the specific category.
If you are using Copenhagen theme then you can put {{#is id CAT_ID}} right after {{#each category}} and {{/is}} right before {{/each}}.
Replace CAT_ID with the ID of the category that you want to hide.
Let me know if you face any issue.
Team Diziana
Hi ,
Does there any API to edit the existing Category name and description?
Thanks
Hi @sushma,
Yes, please take a look at Zendesk API.
Team Diziana
Is there any way to have articles in a category that are not within sections?
Hi @Meghan,
It seems like you are looking at Chat instead of Guide. You need to select Guide by clicking at four dots icon (right next to your avatar) in the header.
Then, click on the Book icon in the left sidebar and you will be able to manage and see the articles.
Team Diziana
@trapta, I have no idea how that happened, I thought I was responding to a completely different ticket. My question is: Is there any way to have articles in a category that are not within sections in said category?
I wish I could mark a category as private/internal. I only see that as an option for sections.
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