Article revisions are the body and title edits that are made to each version of a knowledge base article. Each time an article is saved, a new version of the article is saved. You can view the revisions that were made to any version, and you can restore any version, if you need to.
In addition to viewing the revised title and body content for an article, you can also easily view the article's complete history of changes, including: publishing events, author changes, label changes, body updates, and section changes. Note that inline CSS changes are not tracked in the revision history.
To view the history of the article, see Viewing article events and history for a specific article.
Viewing revisions for an article
You can view previous versions of an article and the revisions that were made in each version. Revisions include all changes made to the title and body content.
To view revisions for an article
- Navigate to the article you want to review, then click Edit article in the top menu bar.
- Click Revisions at the top of the article.
- Select any version in the article sidebar to see the changes that were made to that version.
Note: If you were an existing customer on February 15th, 2017, you can see revisions beginning February 15th, 2017. If you became a customer after that date, revisions begin on the date you enabled Guide. - Review the changes.
The revisions show you the differences between the selected version and the previous version of the article. Removed content is shown in red and added content is shown in green.
You can restore a previous version if you want, by clicking Restore (see Restoring a previous version of an article). You can see the article's history by clicking Article history.
- If you want to hide the revisions while you are viewing a version, click Show changes at the top to toggle changes off.
- Click Back to return to the published version of the article.
Restoring a previous version of an article
You can view previous versions of an article and restore any version to make it the current published version. You cannot restore individual revisions in a version. You can restore previous versions of the article only.
To view a previous version of an article
- Navigate to the article, then click Edit article in the top menu bar.
- Click Revisions at the top of the article.
- Select the version you want to restore in the article sidebar, then click Restore.
The entire version of the article will be restored. You cannot restore individual revisions.
- Click Restore again to confirm that you want to revert to that version.
The article editor shows the restored version, ready to be published.
- Click Save or, on Enterprise plans, click the Save drop-down arrow, then select Publish.
19 Comments
Hey Everyone! This update is great and I know a lot of hard work went into making this available.
I was wondering if you had any plans to take this a step further and allow for writers to make updates to an existing, published article but not publish those updates until they're ready to. For example, let's say we have a product and an article that shows customers how to do something with that product. Changes are made to the product, but not released to the public yet. We want to be able to update the article but not publish it until the product updates are released.
1. Need to be able to compare between chosen versions of an article. It does not greatly help if user can only view changes to the previous version. We need to pass to translation a change register over a wider period of time.
2. If possible please allow versions to be labeled. This so that instructions can be labeled to the same version of a software package.
Point 1 is what has prevented us for years from using help centre.
For visibility to our product team and to allow other users to upvote your idea and add comments, would you mind posting this to the Feedback - Help Center (Guide) topic in our community forums, using the Product Feedback Post Template? Thanks!
Hi!
Is restoring an older version compatible with content blocks?
I tried with a draft i was working on, and it seems all the content blocks just disappeared.
Hi Louise,
Thanks for bringing this up. I have created a support ticket so we can further investigate this. Please expect an email shortly.
Thank you!
I bumped into this thread, since I'm researching how to write different support articles for various product versions.
Context:
we are soon releasing v2 of our product/service, and we'd like to change all relevant articles to reflect the new features, and "switch over" to the new versions of the support/KB articles once the new product/service version is released.
How would I approach that?
Hi Erik Norman,
If you're looking to flip the switch on portions of your articles, you can use the new(er) Content Blocks feature perhaps? If you're looking to replace all articles, you'll likely want to draft and save your new articles but not publish and then bulk update them to publish and bulk update the older versions to unpublish them.
Just keep in mind, if your customers are subscribed to sections on your Guide, they will get a stream of emails - one for each new published article. Edits don't send an email (as far as I know) but you can make a comment on the article if activated and if the customer is subscribed to comments, they'll get the email.
Hope this helps!
Is there a way to fetch article revisions through API?
Upon checking, it's not possible due to the limited parameters available in the article APIs.
Hi Zendesk team,
Is there any chance we can enable the version history for all users (including light agents and end users)? This would be extremely important for us since we use Zendesk Guide for the complete documentation of our software solutions, and we have many articles that are updated on a regular basis (whenever there is an update in our software), so editors as well as our customers need to be able to quickly identify the changes between versions to understand what has been changed in the software.
Since this is so important, we currently use the following workaround:
This is extremely inefficient, time-consuming and error-prone and causes a lot of frustration among our editors and also customers when changes aren't properly marked.
Hey Angela, this is great product feedback that I'd like to make sure our product managers see. Would you mind re-posting it in the Guide product feedback topic in the community so that the PMs will see it?
Thanks Nicole, I posted it here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/5488958169754-Version-history-for-all-users
Is it possible to add a free text comment when publishing a change?
Is there any other way to see the history of setting an article to Unpublish?
We are able to see a timestamp for when the article is set to Publish and when it gets automatically Published or Unpublished. However, there is no timestamp when we schedule an article to Unpublish.
Not sure what timestamp you are referring to but is this the article that would suffice - Scheduling articles for publishing and publishing?
Jupete,
No, it does not. When you look at the revision history on an article, everything is documented that happens to an article, EXCEPT when it is set to unpublish at a specific time. This is a huge issue, so we hope there is another way to find out what user set a particular article to Unpublish.
Hi. I have two questions. First, did point 1 from Jame's comment get any traction with the product team and an official feature request? If so, and if there's a "voting" place somewhere, I'd like to up the vote with a +100 for needing to select my versions to compare.
Second, is there a comment, ticket, chat, etc., anywhere about how there is no "force browser refresh" or no warning that a newer version of an article is available? We just moved to ZD, and we realized that if I save, leave tab open, another user saves, then when I begin working again in the article with the same tab open, ZD assumes I want the text currently visible in my screen to be the most recent version, and it literally just overwrote all my colleague's changes. There was no warning there was a newer version. There was no browser refresh. It literally just let me start editing and saved again, and wrote over someone else changes. How is it possible to collaborate? We are also attempting to collaborate in "waves" because of the fact there is still no commenting feature or collaborative method to working in a team. So, we feel frustrated with this. Surely a browser refresh when newer changes are found can be forced?
For your first question, I don't see any update yet. Regarding your second concern, it seems that our PMs are planning it for next year based on this comment.
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