Adding subsections to create more levels in your help center

Fastpath: Help Center or Guide Admin > Add button > Section

Flexible Hierarchies enables you to add subsections (sections in sections), to your help center knowledge base to create more levels in your hierarchy, up to six levels deep. You cannot add more levels to your community.

You must be a Guide admin to add subsections to your help center knowledge base.

Note: Before you add subsections, be sure to review Getting started with subsections. You might need to modify your theme to enable subsections and display subsections.

This article contains the following sections:

• About subsections
• Getting started with subsections
• Adding a subsection to a section

About subsections

You can create subsections (sections in sections), in your knowledge base to create more levels in your content hierarchy. You can have a maximum of six levels using nested sections: Category > section > section > section > section > section. Each section can have a maximum of 200 sections in it.

Note: When you are in a parent section, you'll see up to five article links in each subsection, and a link to any further articles in that subsection.

You can put articles at any section level of the hierarchy, but articles cannot appear under categories. Sections can contain sections or articles or both.

The following diagram shows a help center hierarchy with four levels, including three section levels.

Getting started with subsections

If you have never used Flexible Hierarchies functionality to add a subsection to your help center, there are some considerations and possible theme updates to make before you add subsections to your help center.

To get started with subsections

1. Ensure you have added code to your custom theme to enable subsections, if necessary.

   If you are using a theme customized before March 29th, 2019, you need to add code to your custom theme to enable subsections before you can add subsections to your help center. Subsections are available by default in standard themes and themes that were customized after March 29, 2019.

   If this step applies to you, see Enabling subsections in your theme.

2. Decide on the design you'd like for subsections in your help center and update your theme to display subsections, if you'd like.

   By default, the help center category page lists all sections in the category and all articles in each section in the category. When you add subsections to a section, the category page does not list subsections in the section by default, but instead the section with subsections appears as "empty" on the category page.

   

   If you want to modify your template to change how subsections display, see Displaying subsections in your help center.

3. Add subsections to your help center.

   If you have ensured that subsections are enabled in your theme and you are happy with how subsections display in your help center, then you can add subsections and articles to your hierarchy.

   When you're ready to add subsections to your help center, see Adding a subsection to a section in this article.

Adding a subsection to a section

You can add subsections (sections in sections), to your help center. You can nest sections in sections for a maximum of five section levels. Each section can contain up to a maximum of 20 sections in a section.

Important: When you add subsections to your knowledge base, you might want to modify the code for your Category page to display the subsections, see Displaying subsections in your help center.

To add a section in a section

1. In your 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. Ensure the correct Source language is selected if you support multiple languages.
4. 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.

5. Under Hierarchy, click in the field, then select the section where you'd like this section to appear in your help center.

   Click the names of categories and sections to drill down in the hierarchy and use the breadcrumbs to move back up in the hierarchy.

   You can nest sections in sections for a maximum of five section levels. Each section can contain articles or sections, up to a maximum of 20 sections in a section.

6. 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.