Question
Can I put an article or section in multiple sections or categories?
Answer
In Help Center, content is organized in a Home > Categories > Sections > Articles structure. With default functionality, a section can only be in one category and an article can only be in one section.
However you can display a link to the section or article in the page you'd like it to also be available by customizing the template page for the section or category. To do this open the template editor in Help Center > General > Customize Design > Edit Theme
Using the is property you can code in the reference to display the content in the additional section or category (see Help Center template is property). You will need the ID of the section or category. This can be found at the end of the section or category URL you want to add the content to. For example, https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/#######
To add an article to a section:
{{#is section.id ######}}
<a href="https://help center article URL without the title">alt text</a>
{{/is}}
To add a section to a category:
{{#is category.id ######}}<a href="https://help center section URL without the title">alt text</a>
{{/is}}
To add an article to the category page within the {{#each section}} helper:
{{#is id ######}}<a href="https://help center article URL without the title">alt text</a>
{{/is}}
If you’re adding an article or section to an empty section or category. The process is a bit different and involves incorporating the if/else statement used to display an empty link within the category or section.
For adding an article to an empty section there is an {{#if section.articles}} statement. Within that statement, the {{else}} statement should look like this:
{{else}}{{#is section.id ######}}
<ul class="article-list">
<li class="article-list-item">
<a href="https://help center article URL without the title">alt text</a>
</li>
</ul>
{{else}}
<i class="section-empty">
<a href="{{section.url}}">{{t 'empty'}}</a>
</i>
{{/is}}
{{/if}}
For adding a section to an empty category, the {{else}} statement will look like this:
{{else}}{{#is category.id ######}}
<section class="section">
<h3 class="section-tree-title">
<a href="https://help center section URL without the title">alt text</a>
</h3>
</section>
{{else}}
<i class="category-empty">
<a href="{{category.url}}">{{t 'empty'}}</a>
</i>
{{/is}}
74 Comments
Thanks Rebecca for the tip, but... Frankly that is convoluted and would be very hard to maintain.
What is really needed here is an additional feature that allows a single Article to be published into multiple Sections. Consider our example.
Our category/section/article hierarchy is:
Categories:
Each has the same sections based on our 7 products. Then relevant articles in each section. Most of the time an article fits cleanly into a single Section.
We REALLY need for Articles to be able to be published in multiple Sections. We specifically do not want to have 2+ articles that are copy/pasted and then published into the various sections. For obvious reasons when they need to be updated.
A secondary (nice to have) would be to enable a given section to show up in multiple categories. For us typically KBAs and FAQ, though may also be Announcements too.
Thanks for the article/code Rebecca.
I would second Michael's comment that it would be a great feature to be able to publish an article into multiple sections direct in the user interface.
Is it possible to add this as a feature request if not already?
Dan
Hey Dan!
There is, in fact, a post about this in our Product Feedback forum. You can find it here: Allow articles to be posted to multiple sections.
I encourage you to add your vote and detailed use case to the thread!
But how can I get the ID from URL?
Hi Rian,
The ID is the number part of the URL. For example, the ID for this article is 224924108.
When you view a category, section, or article, you can copy the ID from the URL.
Hope that helps!
Hi Rebecca,
I saw this but cannot remember who posted it. We want to link to a section from a category. We want to set up our home page just the screenshots below where
1) The Category has a drop down
2) The category expands to show the linked sections when selected
You mentioned we can add a section to a category, but where exactly does this code go?
Thank you!
JR
Hi JR,
I think this might be the tip you're looking for:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001228168
Hello, I'm using the method for displaying content on empty category and section pages, but empty categories not accessible to logged out visitors! Is there any way around this?
Hi Ben! Welcome to the Community!
Guide is built specifically to hide empty Categories and Sections, with the idea that businesses don't want their customers to see areas of their Knowledge Base with nothing in it. So this is functioning as intended.
Provided that I understand your question, I think the only way to show this content in an otherwise empty category or section is to add at least one section to the category, and one article to that section. I think that should take care of it!
Hey Jessie/Rebecca!
I've instigated the above but am now wondering if it's possible to show localised versions of articles (depending on the detected locale)?
Cheers
Matt
Hey Matt -
We do offer Localization for accounts on Guide Professional. Here's more info on that for you:
Localizing Help Center content
Thanks Nicole!
But I was referring more to when we 'hack' and display articles in multiple sections.
If I paste an article and its URL it will only show that localised version. Is there a way to post a URL that will detect the locale and serve the localised article title?
Hi there,
I'm really new to Zendesk, and I'm having quite the hard time implementing the following code:
Currently I'm trying to put it into my <li> part of the Category page in line 36, but I keep getting the error message telling me that it's an invalid reference.
It would be greatly appreciated if someone could give me a detailed instruction!
Thanks,
Hi Seita -

Sorry for the confusion here- our Help Center templating language Curlybars only supports certain expressions and properties in the various templates. From what I understand, you are looking to use the section property in the category template and however you'd instead be looking to leverage the category object to display another section in the category template. Using
{{#is section ####}}
in the cateogry template does not work as you are editing the category template and are looking to display a section on a category page. The following should work however:Wow... is it that hard for a team/company as big as Zendesk to add this feature? Instead we have to "hack away" at the list code and "bolt on" the articles we want added to other sections/categories. Can't you just add some kind of functionality with the tags? Organize by tag or something? Like Gmail. That would be so much nicer than this static Category -> Section -> Article paradigm.
Ugh... this solution is so gross.
Please Zendesk add this feature. I get more bummed out with Zendesk each day that I use it.
Hey Ross -
Thanks for your feedback. Publishing articles to multiple sections is definitely on the product team's radar. It's a major structural change within Guide, so yes, it is something that takes some time to build. But the conversations about this happening in the Community have not gone un-heeded.
I'm evaluating Zendesk Guide and this is pretty much a show-stopper for us. Agree with Ross that this is very undesirable. It appears I will have to look elsewhere.
hope this feature comes out soon
Hi Mark and Lou -
It is something that the Guide team is working on, but we do not have any timeline on it that we can share.
Hello!
Wondering if there is a straight-forward way to create a section in a category that includes all articles within the KB. Would love to hear any additional details on how to achieve this.
Hi Rebecca,
Your code has some typos I discovered while implementing this. For displaying an article in an empty section, the else section is for {{#if section.articles}}, not {{#if section.article}}. Also, the code to be inserted should include
{{#is section.id ######}} not
{{is section.id ######}}. Thirdly, this code will not display the article in the category overview unless you also add the following to category_page.hbs:
{{#is id #####}}
<ul class="article-list">
<li class="article-list-item">
<a href="https://">alt text</a>
</li>
</ul>
{{else}}
<i class="section-empty">
<a href="{{url}}">{{t 'empty'}}</a>
</i>
{{/is}}
Hi Andrew -
Thanks for letting me know - I have fixed the two typos you mentioned. In regards to the empty section, this is good to know! In most instances I have seen customers want to add an existing article to a section with other content so this maybe more a unique case. Thank you for providing the example however!
Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for including my suggestions.
My use case for the "empty" category/section is for a FAQ that highlights articles that may otherwise be lost among less relevant content in other sections, without "promoting" too many articles.
Hi Rebecca,
I'm having a bit of trouble with adding an Article to the Category Page and having it show on the mobile app the way it is coming up on the website.
Is there a way to get it to sit under Categories, without the Section part?
Hi Liam! Welcome to the Community!
I'm afraid that all articles have to be under a section; there's no way to have an article directly underneath a category in the hierarchy out of the box.
One of our Community Members wrote up a Tip that shows you how to display all your articles under the category name on your main HC page, though. It might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it should get you started!
This hack is a little dopey and it's easy to imagine why a bigger overhaul is underway, but why isn't there a stopgap solution now that just implements it with a GUI menu item?
Our dev teams are focused on building the final solution so they can get that out to you all as quickly as possible. But if someone wanted to develop a stopgap solution and share it with the Community, that would be awesome!
Looking forward to the real solution on this one. Manually adding each article to the section template, category template, and the sidebar section of the article template is way more than our team can keep track of for the number of articles that we need to populate into multiple categories.
Glad to hear you're excited for it, Jameson!
Do you have a timescale on when we can expect to see this essential feature?
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