Guide admins can create, edit, and remove links in any new or existing article in the knowledge base. Agents who are not Guide admins can create, edit, and remove links in articles where they have management permissions.
Inserting links in articles
You can insert a link in an article for existing text or at the point where your cursor appears.
To insert a link in an article
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, create a new article or edit an existing article.
- Highlight text or place the cursor where you want the link to appear, then click Insert/edit link on the editor's toolbar.
- In the dialog box, do one of the following:
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To link to a URL, in the URL tab, paste in the link URL. For example,
https://zendesk.com
. Make sure you include the entire URL, including the HTTP or HTTPS format. If you don't add the entire URL, you'll get a broken link. -
To link to a heading in this article, click the Heading tab, then select a heading in the article.
The title of each heading appears, along with its style, so that you know the heading level for each heading in the article.
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To link to an article in your Help Center, click the Help Center article tab, then select an article title that appears or enter a search for an article, then select an article that appears.Note: If you use multiple languages in your Help Center, we recommend inserting links using the Help Center article tab, to ensure that the article opens in the language that the customer is currently viewing the Help Center.
Click Clear beside the article title if you want to remove the link to an article and select a new article.
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To link to a URL, in the URL tab, paste in the link URL. For example,
- In Text on link, enter or edit the link text you want to appear in the article.
If you highlighted text in the article before you click the Link button, the text appears in the field. If you edit the text here, it will update in the article.
- Select Open in new tab if you'd like the link to open in a new browser tab.
If the checkbox is not selected, the link will open in the current browser tab, replacing the article.
- Click Link.
The link appears in the article.
Editing links in articles
You can edit any existing link in an article to change the text or link target.
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, open an existing article in edit mode.
- Highlight the link you want to edit in the article.
- To change the link text, simply type over the existing text.
- To change the link target, click Insert/edit link on the editor's toolbar, then do any of the following:
- In the URL tab, select the existing URL in the field and paste in a new URL, then click Link.
- Click the Heading tab, select a heading in the article, then click Link.
- Click the Help Center article tab, click Clear, if an article is currently selected, and select another article in your Help Center, then click Link
The link is updated in the article.
Removing links in articles
You can remove a link from text if you want to the text to be plain text and no longer a link.
To remove an existing link in an article
- In Help Center or Guide Admin, open an existing article in edit mode.
- Highlight the link you want to remove in the article.
- Click Insert/edit link on the editor's toolbar, then do any of the following:
- Click Remove link at the bottom of the dialog box.
The link is removed from the article.
67 comments
Ryan McGrew
Hey All,
I've escalated this to a ticket for the team to investigate as this appears like a bug.
Thanks!
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Milan Wack
Kristina Tibbitts
In our case, it is up and running again. (Maybe give it a new try :-) )
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Nancy Scanlon
We are also experiencing this, and we must have TOCs in the top of our articles. (VERY frustrating that we cannot use a proxy TOC, but that's another story for another day.)
Can someone from ZD please respond with an update as to when we can expect a fix for this issue?
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zendeskagent
We are able to see the contents in the heading, However, when we try to link with in the article, It jumps to other section of the article.
Zendesk team, can someone help me on this.
1
Milan Wack
Zendesk Devs
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Casey
Hey Y'all - Looks like the bug is fixed. Was able to create and link to headings on a fresh article this morning.
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Dganit Rauchwerger
Hey everyone, this was working for me for a few days and today again, no luck - I don't see my headings again...
Very frustrating. Are others experiencing the same?
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Giuseppe
Hi Dganit,
I understand this can be frustrating. I've tested this on multiple accounts but I'm not able to replicate the issue. Adding a link to heading seems to be working properly:
Since this has worked before, and only stopped working recently, we may want to ensure that this is not a browser-caused issue by following the steps in this article - Options to clear cache and cookies.
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Dganit Rauchwerger
Hi @..., things seem to be fine now. Thanks for your assistance.
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Janine Deegan
I'd like "Open in a new tab" to be defaulted On. Is there any way to do that?
2
Jupete Manitas
Hi Janine, thanks for writing in! I see that you would like that "Open in a new tab" to be defaulted On. Unfortunately, this is something created natively and we don't have the settings in our admin to make it default as selected. However, you can post a product feedback in our Guide about this. Here is our link for Guide - Product feedback. Thank you!
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Tommy Nicholls
Hello, I was wondering, if I update the title of an article, do I have to manually update all the links to that article elsewhere in the knowledge base? In this instance, the links are in a "See also" Section at the bottom of articles, and the "Text on Link" is the title of the article.
Thank you for your time.
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Brett Bowser
If you update the article title then they should also be updated when viewing all articles within a section as well. That being said, if you referenced an article by title in another article then those would need to be updated manually.
Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question!
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Rebeca
Hello, do you have any best practices for adding links to articles and then managing translations?
We have translated more than 100 articles and had to spend a lot of time checking article by article and manually changing the links to the correct language.
Any input is appreciated, thanks!
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Anne Ronalter
Thank you for your Feedback on that.
Natively this is unfortunately not possible, but as a workaround, you can use Google Analytics for finding broken links to deleted pages:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408883297690#topic_ys2_rr3_gn
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Jennifer Rowe
Hi Rebeca
I know you might not have dev resources to help with this, but just thought I'd mention that we run a script to update links in all our translations when we publish them. That's how we manage it for the documentation here at Zendesk.
Unfortunately there's not a a native solution, as Anne mentioned.
1
Rebeca
Thanks for the answer Anne Ronalter.
Jennifer Rowe where can I find more information about this script? we work with some developers, and I could bring this up with them.
Thanks in advance!
1
Jennifer Rowe
We haven't published anything about the script we use and I don't know anything more about it.
The person on our team who created the script is currently on leave, but I'll ask him to provide more info if he can when he's back. That won't be until next month though. Sorry for the wait!
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James Rodewig
Hi Rebeca,
Sorry to hear you're having to manually update all those links. Sounds exhausting!
If you haven't yet, I recommend reading our Using the Help Center API to manage article translations article in the Developer Docs. It gives you some tips for using code to handle your help center translations. We tried to make the article beginner-friendly, so I hope it's useful even if you don't have any prior programming experience.
Toward the end of the article, there's a section that covers uploading translations as a deliverable. If you're uploading translations from JSON like in the article, you can add a line to the Python script in that section to update Help Center links in your translations. The line essentially finds and replaces /hc/en-us/ in your translations with /hc/{locale}/.
Here's the modified script (the new line starts with article['body']):
As a note, there is a typo in the article snippet (https://example.zendesk.com is written as https://example.zendesk.com.zendesk.com). I fixed the typo in the script above and will update the article shortly.
I hope that helps!
2
Rebeca
James Rodewig this is great, thank you so much for the help.
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Rebeca
James Rodewig I was looking into this code, for translations, we use the tool Lingpad to pull the content, translate and then push the content back to Zendesk Guide, would this code be applicable for something like this?
Thanks in advance!
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James Rodewig
Hi Rebeca,
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Lingpad or how they push translations to your help center.
However, you can use the following Python script to update links in translated articles once they're in your help center (likely after Lingpad pushes the content):
Unlike the previous script, this one doesn't require a JSON file containing the translations. Instead, you just need to replace the auth, subdomain, and article_ids values at the top of the file with your own values. article_ids should contain the list of article ids you'd like to update.
I suggest trying this script out with a test article (or even a test account) before using it in production or on a larger scale.
Please also note that we can't guarantee the above code or provide support for the script. However, I hope it's enough to get you started and help you explore the Help Center APIs on your own.
Best of luck!
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Stuart Buddrige
Hi,
Is it possible from a Category page to link to another section page that is not in that Category?
For example, imagine I had 2 Categories called Desktop and Mobile. Under Mobile I have Android and iOS. When I select the Desktop link, is it possible to have a direct link to the Mobile Category page in there, or it's sections (Android and iOS), as opposed to having to go back and select the initial Mobile page itself?
I don't want the link to be in an article - just a header section itself if possible like my attached mock up.
The use case here is we have multiple sections across our site for one product and we are wondering if it's possible to have links to all these sections on one single page without having to create the sections themselves on that specific page.
Thanks,
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Stuart Buddrige
I can't attach my mock up for some reason.
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Christopher Kennedy
It's definitely possible to do this within the category page template. To do so, use the if helper to check the current category and conditionally render a link to the other category. For example, the following does this in your Desktop or Mobile example:
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Movell Sarran
Can you insert Guide articles easily into Agent Live Chats?
1
Megha Joshi
A hashtag appears at the end of every Heading 2 link we insert -- does anyone know why? This occurs regardless of whether it is linked/unlinked, viewed as an agent/admin or end-user.
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Christophe A.
I've just checked with the default Copenhagen theme and there is no hashtag for me.
It's probably related to your theme. I would recommend to check the CSS file on this one. You can temporarily switch to the default theme to confirm that it is related to your theme.
Movell, you can enable the article recommandations in the Classic widget (Enabling Article Recommendations in Web Widget (Classic)).
If your question is more how an agent can easily insert an article link, the best option is our Knowledge Capture app (available for Chat sessions in Agent Workspace).
Hope it helps :-)
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Movell Sarran
Can you insert Guide articles easily into Agent Live Chats?
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Christophe A.
If your instance is configured with the standard agent interface, I'm afraid there is no option to easily insert links to the guide (except copy/paste the links).
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