Guide admins can create new articles and edit all existing articles in the knowledge base. Agents who are not Guide admins can create and edit articles if they have management permissions. End users can't contribute articles to the knowledge base.
You must have at least one section in the knowledge base before you can start adding articles. When you create an article, you must assign it to a section. For more information, see Anatomy of the help center.
Adding articles to the knowledge base
Guide admins can create new articles. Agents can create new articles if they have management permissions. Agent privileges for new articles vary depending on their management permissions. See the complete list of agent privileges for existing, published articles.
You can create a maximum of 40,000 total articles, excluding translations. This limit includes articles in all states, except archived.
To add an article to the knowledge base
- In your help center or Guide, click Add in the top menu bar, then select
Article.
- Enter your content.
- Use the article editor's toolbar for formatting options or to add links, images,
or tables. This toolbar is not the same as the toolbar in community posts.
For information, see the Help center article editor toolbar reference. See also Inserting links, Inserting images in articles and content blocks, and Inserting videos. For tables, check out this formatting tip.
-
Edit the HTML source by clicking the Source Code button at the end of the editor's toolbar.
Note: To keep your help center secure and provide the best experience for your end users, Zendesk limits the HTML you can use in articles. For information, see Allowing unsafe HTML in articles.
- Use the article editor's toolbar for formatting options or to add links, images,
or tables. This toolbar is not the same as the toolbar in community posts.
- Review and configure the article settings in the Management section:
- Under Management permissions, click the drop-down arrow, then select
management permissions to determine which agents have editing and publishing rights
for this article.
- Administrators enables only Guide admins to edit and publish the article. This option is selected by default on new articles.
- Agents and admins enables all agents and admins to edit and publish the article.
- Editors and Publishers (Enterprise plans only), enables all agents and admins to edit this article but only admins can publish the article. This option appears only if it's been activated.
- Custom management permission enables specific user segments to edit and publish the article.
Depending on your account, you might also see an agents and managers option.
Guide admins can apply any management permissions. Agents with management permissions can apply only the management permissions they belong to. Agents who do not have management permissions on any article will not see this option, and the management permissions will default to admins.
- Under Owner, verify or select a new owner for the article.
- Under Management permissions, click the drop-down arrow, then select
management permissions to determine which agents have editing and publishing rights
for this article.
- Review and configure the article settings in the Placement section:
- Under Section, click Manage sections, then select a new section and
click Ok.
You can search for or navigate to the section. All of your categories might not appear in the window. To navigate, click the expander arrows to drill down to the section you want.
- Under Author, verify or select a new author for the article.
- Under Viewing permissions, select one of the following options to determine
which users can view this article:
- Visible to everyone includes anyone who visits your help center and does not require sign in.
-
Only visible to selected user segments select up to 10 user segments from
any of the following:
- Signed-in users includes internal and external users who create an account and sign in to your help center.
-
Agents and admins includes team members only, so that you can create
content that is internal-only. Note: Light agents are included in this segment. For a list of light agent permissions, see Understanding and setting light agent permissions.
- Custom user segment enables you to restrict viewing access to specific users based on tags, organizations, or groups by applying user segments. See Creating user segments to restrict access.
- (Not available on Suite Team) Under Content tags, start typing the content tag you want to add, then select Add as new tag or select the matching content tag, if it exists. See Adding content tags to articles.
- (Not available on Suite Team) Under Labels, add any labels you want.
As you start typing, a list of existing labels appears for you to chose from, or you can add a new keyword by selecting Add as a new label or by typing a word and pressing Enter.
For more information about using labels and best practices, see Using labels on help center articles.
You can add labels to the default language article only and not to translations of the article. You can add labels in multiple languages to the default article.
- Choose any of the following options:
- To close the article for comments, deselect Turn on comments.
- To promote the article in its section, select Promote article.
- To add an attachment, click Manage attachment in the Attachments section
at the bottom of the pane. See Attaching media to articles.
The file size limit is 20 MB. You can remove an attachment by clicking the x next to it.
- (Enterprise plans only) Under Template, if you have multiple article templates in your live theme, click the
drop-down, then select a template.
You might have to scroll down to see this option. If you do not select an alternate template, the default article template will be applied.
- Under Attached media, click Manage attached media to attach a downloadable file to the article. See Attaching media to articles.
- Under Section, click Manage sections, then select a new section and
click Ok.
- When you are finished working on your article, do one of the following:
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish later, click
Save.
Click Preview to view the article in your help center.
- When you're ready to publish your article, click the drop-down arrow on the Save button, then select Publish.
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish later, click
Save.
Editing articles in the knowledge base
Guide admins can edit any articles. Agents can edit existing articles where they have management permissions. Agent privileges for existing articles vary depending on their management permissions. See the complete list of agent privileges for existing, published articles.
Saving edits for an existing published article as a work in progress is only available on Enterprise plans.
There are some article updates that you can make on multiple articles in bulk. For more information, see Updating knowledge base articles in bulk.
- In your help center, navigate to the article you want to edit, then click Edit
article in the top menu bar.
- In Guide Admin, click the Manage articles (
) icon in the sidebar, search for the article, then click the title to open it.
- In Guide Admin, click the Arrange content (
) icon in the sidebar, navigate to the article, then click the options menu at the end of the title and select Edit article.
51 comments
Aliaksei Krytau
Hello!
Could you please tell me, how can I assign one article to 2 or more diffenerent sections of the help center?
For example:
artilce XYZ
There are sections A B and C
So I need to assign the same article to the sections A B C to be able to edit only one article.
Links are not OK, I need thw whole text.
Any ideas?
0
Brett Bowser
Hey Aliaksei,
Currently it's not possible to assign an article to multiple sections in the Help Center. However, this is something our product managers are working towards with the Content Blocks feature. You can find out more from our Product manager in this post: Allow articles to be posted to multiple sections
More information on Content Blocks can be found here as well: Managing content blocks
I hope this helps!
0
Syndi Martin
We have several "desk books" we created in Word and saved as pdf that we send to clients but would like to had to Zendesk instead. Is there a way to do that? I've tried copy/paste but it doesn't paste images and further, the table of contents is out of whack. These books can be 30-40 pages and I don't want to have to recreate them as articles.
1
Dave Dyson
Hi Syndi,
You might be in luck, in that I think your Help Center might be old enough that you still have access to this Google Doc importer – if so, you'd want to copy your Word content over to Google Docs and then import from there: Importing Google Docs into your knowledge base
If you don't have access to that, then you're probably better off creating each article individually (or posting the articles publicly and adding links to them in your Help Center).. The alternatives are to use the API (see Migrating existing content to your help centeror one of a few import apps, but all of those will require reformatting of your articles to meet the needs of the particular method (JSON format in the case of the API, or CSV/Excel format in the case of the apps). If you need to reformat the articles anyway, then you might as well spend that energy putting them into your Help Center directly.
1
Dave Dyson
The Show Article API endpoint should include the article content in the "body" element of the JSON output. (Article attachments, Article comments, and Article labels are handled separately). Hope that helps!
1
Arati C
Hi,
I am new to ZenDesk. I wanted to know, how I can edit and save the articles that are published.
I tried editing an article, that was already published and when I selected save, it went ahead and published it. Thankfully, it was very minor change.
Can anyone tell me how to edit and save the articles for review, that are published??
Thanks,
Arati
1
Dave Dyson
Saving edits for an existing published article as a work in progress is only available on Guide Enterprise.
2
Eduardo Escobar
Hello, I'm wondering how I can add an "Accordion" when making an article
Thanks
0
Dave Dyson
We have a user tip for this! Tip: Collapsible headers in articles or templates (accordions)
1
Andrew Nagel
Hi there!
I'd like to set up a KB article so that if the logged in user is, say, part of the support team, then they can see more information than a customer user. For example:
Support team user sees this:
KBXXXX - Application stops with error 15.
Explanation: The service has experienced an error. Contact customer support.
Resolution: Gather logs and restart the service.
Customer user sees this:
KBXXXX - Application stops with error 15
Explanation: The service has experienced an error. Contact customer support.
Does this make sense? Is this possible?
Thanks!
0
Jeff C
Hi Andrew,
I am afraid that there is no native functionality that would be able to show your describe use case. Creating articles in Guide are standard across all and the only way to restrict them is via User Segments and this is on a per article basis.
0
Regina Crusan
Hi There,
I am new to the Zendesk and I have several questions about formatting of articles within Knowledge Base:
Thanks in advance,
Regina
0
Ifra Saqlain
Hey Regina Crusan,
Welcome to our community, feel free to ask any question related to Zendesk products :)
So, your questions are:
Answers:
Yes, It's possible via article editor.
Yes, you can add bg-color, border-color in cells. Click on the table icon, and you will have all the properties for columns and rows.
Not yet I think.
Thanks
Team![](/hc/user_images/mXKm7QjfsTyo44NefKqbOw.png)
0
Zsófia Spicze
Hi,
can you please help me with the following question please?
Is there an opportunity in Zendesk Knowledge Management for agents / logged-in users to submit requests for the admins to create new articles / edit existing articles?
Thank you!
0
Venn Villanueva
Hi Zsófia Spicze
Yes, your agents can actually send feedback on existing articles by the use of Knowledge Capture app. However, it's only available for agents and not for end-users. You can check this section for more details.
Working with the Knowledge Capture app
0
Felipe Mejia
Is there a way for multiple agents to edit the same article at the same time and save live edits like in a Google Doc?
1
Zachary Evans
How do I add an article to more than one Section?
0
Mary Paez
I believe you can add bookmarks into an article by using the following:
1
IT
How can we select multiple questions at the same from one section and move them under another instead of doing it one by one? thanks
0
Abhilasha Dabral
How can I change my article's list into individual boxes (with hyperlinks) just like the homepage?
0
Ifra Saqlain
Hi Abhilasha Dabral, tell the template name where you want to do it?
0
Nikki Story
I needed to delete an attachment in an article, but it was not apparent in edit mode. Seeing the instructions here, it says that there will be an 'x' next to it to click to remove it. There is not an 'x' visible but I did click on the blank space to the right of the attachment link and it put a strike-through on it which I assume means that it is deleted (once I save it).
0
Ifra Saqlain
Hi Nikki Story,
Actually it's from the backend,
Strike shows that your attachment has removed from the article.
0
Paul Newsom
I quite often need to paste text without formatting into articles using ctrl+shift+v. Since a couple of weeks ago, every time I do this it causes the vertical scroll bar in the editor to jump to its centre (and pastes the text as expected). Having to scroll back to where I pasted the text can be quite time-consuming, especially if having to do lots of pasting in a lengthy article.
I figured out this Workaround in the middle of making this post - press the left arrow key after pasting and the scroll bar will jump back to where the cursor is (at the end of the pasted text).
Would be good if it didn't do the jumpy thing in the first place though. :)
0
Janet Wilson
Hi - occassionally some of our main articles need major overhaul with new screenshots, new sections, updated content pages etc. How can I edit, review changes and decide when it's ready to update the exisitng article?
Currently, I have to copy all into a new article - make the changes and review it - then either;
Either of these is a real pain - especially as I have three brands to manage/replicate the above actions for. Why in 2022 from one of the worlds leading KB software companies can we not have the ability to save but not publish updates?? Life would be sooo much easier for authors.
Edit - I suppose a third option is to entirely replace the original article. But then would have to find and mend any other links. Is there a quick way to look for broken links?? I would presumably also still have to upload and insert all the images that were copied and retained from the original article.
zendesk zendesk what would you suggest as the most effective way to do this - I imagine many if not all users have this use case to one extent or another?!
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Janet Wilson
To confirm, you do have an option to save but not publish article changes. I just tried it on my test account. Here in the 1st screenshot, I saved a change in my test article. It would also show it is under review.
If I open my article, it would show the update 4 months ago & not my saved changes since it wasn't published.
But to clarify, you do have the option to use the 'save' function if you are on the Suite Growth and Professional or Guide Professional. We have seen your feedback that this as well. We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the forums help influence future Zendesk functionality.
0
Nora
I am using Enterprise but don't see the option to preview - am I missing something?![](/hc/user_images/mdElGnMgm2Jyt1Kl-mtCqw.jpeg)
0
Liz Tran
When creating articles, can authors add a change log to every article summarizing the change? Can it be made a requirement to add a change log entry for every change to an article?
0
Allison Sargent
Liz Tran Unfortunately, there's no feature for adding internal notes to a Guide article. I know this because I (along with many others) have been requesting this for quite some time!
Here's the feature request that should relate to your request.
0
Tim Fischer
Is there a way to attach an image file to an article, and have the "download" link actually download the file to the end user's device? When an end-user clicks the download link for an image attachment, it opens up in a new browser tab - which can be very confusing for our less tech-savy end users.
0