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 admin 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
your
help
center or Guide Admin, click
Add in the top menu bar, then select
Category.
- Enter a Name and optional Description for your category.
- (Enterprise
plans only) 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 contain related articles. To add a section, you must have at least one category to act as its parent container, except on Enterprise plans. On Enterprise plans, sections can also contain subsections, so a section can be a child of a category or a section, whereas on other plans, each section must be child of a category.
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 (not available on Suite Team), 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
your
help
center or Guide Admin, click
Add in the top menu bar, then select
Section.
- Enter a Name and optional Description for your section.
- Ensure the correct Source language is selected if you support multiple languages (not available on Suite Team).
- 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 Suite Growth and above or Guide Professional, you must select a category as the parent for this section. Sections cannot contain sections.
On Enterprise plans, 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 200 sections in a section.
- (Enterprise
plans only) 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 admins.
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:
113 Comments
Hey Linda,
This would most likely require some custom code in your Guide theme to get this functioning how you'd like it to. I would recommend taking a look at this article for hiding Help Center components using curlybars: Selectively hiding Help Center components using Curlybars
I hope this points you in the right direction!
Edit: Found the issue, one category had no published articles
Thanks for coming back and sharing what you found, RTB_IT! Glad to hear you got it figured out :)
Here is my question:
Let's say I have a section called "Section 1" and I have 10 articles under "Section 1". I have another section called "Section 2" and I would like to have a copy of all these 10 articles currently under "Section 1" to show under "Section 2" as well.
Is it possible to do a bulk copy instead of manually doing this to each article?
Hi Sharma,
There isn't a bulk copy option - I just have done this by copying and pasting the content article by article. Luckily for us, it isn't something we have to do that often.
Thanks, Maggie! This is a one time thing for us too as we are redesigning of our KB structure but we have so many that manually is time consuming. :(
Sharma
I haven't looked into this too deeply, but how about exporting your existing articles and then re-importing them (basically as copies) where you want them?
Export: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662346-Exporting-data-to-a-JSON-CSV-or-XML-file-Professional-and-Enterprise-
Import: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004399708-How-to-migrate-Knowledge-Base-articles-from-CSV-to-Zendesk
Thank you Celine! I didn't think of this. I'll give it a shot. Stay safe and thank you once again!
For one of my five categories, I want to jump from the category directly into the article list (skipping the section level as we don't need to divide the category further). Is there a way to do that, either in the interface or with some coding? Maybe we make just one section with all the articles in then hide the section level somehow?
Thanks!
Hi,
We currently have an article under a section under a category. Is there a way to remove the section and have the article directly under the category?
That's my question too, Sarah! Hopefully someone knows the answer.
Hey Sarah and Fiona! The quickest way would be to remove the code that shows the section titles from your Category page, so when a user lands on the Category page they'll just see the list of articles:

This is pretty quick & scrappy and doesn't totally remove references to the sections in your Help Center - for example, you also might want to remove {{breadcrumbs}} from the article_page.hbs template after you do this. But if you're looking for a quick way to remove a click this'll do it :)
Thanks Madison! But is there a non-code way to removing a section?
Sorry to say it, Sarah, but there's not. You can put all of your content into one section that nests into one category, but if you're using the standard Copenhagen theme, it's build to display the category, then sections within it, then articles within those. It's not possible for an article to live in a category without being nested into a section.
Thanks Madison! Appreciate all your help!
Hi Madison Davis,
I wish to display just some articles directly under the category, not all of them.
Would the only solution be putting these articles in a specific section and then add a condition (if the section is not xxx) to display the bloc of section title you highlited ?
You mentionned that this constraint is proper to Copenhagen theme. Could you suggest some themes that do not have this constraint ?
I am on professional plan and I was wondering if Enterprise plan would allow more flexibility (apparently it is possible to add sub-sections, but not removing section?).
I created a dozen of categories and then I realized that Copenhagen theme displays only 3 categories for end-users and that there is no navigation menu... Maybe it's not recommended to use that much categories ?
Otherwise, could someone point me to the good direction to add a menu to the help center ? I'm a total newbee.
Hi,
The Copenhagen theme should adjust to however many categories you create - it isn't limited to only show just three of them. It might be that something is making your categories not show to end users. A few things you can check:
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Maggie
Hi Maggie,
Indeed, I realized that I had only 3 categories with articles visible to end users...
Dummy me !
Thanks for you assistance.
Is it possible to place an article in more than one category? We have several articles that don't just fit into one category.
Hi,
There isn't a way to do this by default in Zendesk but if you have some coding expertise or have access to a developer, there is a solution that may work for you: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/224924108-Displaying-an-article-or-section-in-multiple-sections-or-categories
Thanks,
Maggie
Hello.
We have set up five categories of articles:
We would like for Students, when they click on Student Experience, not to see articles in the other categories even when they use the search bar.
For example, If a student clicks on the Student Experience button and does a search:
They will get non-student related articles.
For example, none of the Articles in the search results below pertain to Students:
Is there a way to prohibit that from happening? Maybe a message that says your search results returns no Articles in Student Experience.
Bill Fanning, could you set up a user segment specifically for students, as well as a user segment for non-students? Then you can define your article visibility by either user segment. If a user segment is not allowed to see an article, it won't show up in search results, and any category or section in which the article exists won't show up to the user.
It's a bit of a clunky solution since it involves defining visibility on an article-by-article basis, but it may work for you.
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