Beginning December 2023 and extending through 2024, the Guide article editor is getting a makeover. This process will pave the way for future capabilities such as article multiplacement, collaboration tools, and generative AI capabilities within the editor.
The UI enhancements will be rolled out gradually throughout 2024. As changes are planned and released, we will update this article to walk you through the latest changes and show you how to navigate the new UI.
Note: Features marked as "coming soon" in this article not yet released, but are planned for release in 2024. Watch this page and Zendesk announcements for more news when the feature becomes available.
This article contains the following topics:
Unified knowledge management
With unified knowledge management, you’ll be able to oversee all of your content in one list, without having to jump between brands in Guide admin to manage your articles. With the arrival of article multiplacement, articles will have placements in various brands, therefore will not be tied to one specific brand. This new feature is designed to give you an efficient knowledge management experience, where you can configure unified lists and execute workflows across your entire knowledge base. Brand-level article management will remain available by using filters.
Released feature summary
Article editor UI enhancement releases began in December of 2023 and will continue to be rolled out gradually throughout 2024. See the following announcements for a description of released features:
- Announcing the article multiplacement EAP
- Announcing the new article editor with generative AI article summaries EAP
- Announcing the new article settings layout
- Announcing enhancements to the article header bar
- Announcing the new article editor toolbar
- Announcing help center translations in the article context panel
- Announcing HTML blocks in content blocks
- Announcing expanded support for HTML tags in content blocks
- Announcing article editor UI enhancements: Action footer and collapsible article settings panel
Frequently asked questions
Can I switch back to the old experience?
No, it's not possible to revert to the previous article editor design. To share your feedback on the new design, please go to our Community page. For information about how to submit your feedback, see:
- Product feedback guidelines and how to write a good feedback post
- Product feedback and feature request post template
Will these changes also include API level access?
API integrations are not in scope of this work. We'll have a separate workstream for those in the future.
24 comments
Zoe Goble
Good to see the article editor is getting some attention. I'm hoping the following ideas have been considered for the article editor UI enhancements:
- Buttons to insert tabs/accordions/buttons (rather than having to code them in manually)
- Collaborative working (supporting multiple users in the document at once)
- Image support for content blocks
- A table of contents generator
- An easier way to create article templates
- Better alignment between editing view and preview/published views
EDIT: the ability to add inline comments when an article in in progress would also be very beneficial.
25
Sagi Welzman
100% agree with Zoe Goble
6
bill cicchetti
"- An easier way to create article templates"
This would be a huge plus for users like myself who post 50+ individual documents at a time and have to continually set fields such as
Managed By
Visible to
Publish in section
"open for comments" checkbox
7
Dan Cooper
Will these changes also include API level access? Some areas like the ability to read/set the owner, template, and team publishing status still don't seem to be available via the API. Some of the gaps around collaboration are more on the notification front and it would be nice to be able to pull a list of tickets where the review status is "Ready for Review" and notify the respective owners in an external tool of our choice.
2
Shawna James
1
Meira Osishkin
Also 100% agree with Zoe Goble!
2
Katarzyna Karpinska
Hi Zoe Goble,
Yes, quite a few the request are on our UI roadmap. As for images in content blocks, they've been supported for quite a while now :)
0
Katarzyna Karpinska
Dan Cooper,
I hear you, but API integrations are not in scope of this work. We'll have a separate workstream for those, sometime in the future.
0
Camila
I completely agree with Zoe Goble
It's good that you're focusing on the article editor, but I believe the most urgent features for teams with technical writers are not enhancements to the UI of the article editor. Instead, the priority should be adding missing features that are crucial for creating effective articles with minimal effort (such as accordions, tabs, buttons, and a table of contents generator). Personally, I don't see why the UI was prioritized over these features, as the latter would save teams significantly more time, in my opinion.
9
Mateusz Gamroth
I am happy to see Guide is not dead! Thank you! ♥
We are looking forward to every improvement, and there is so much to be done which can be seen above. Hope we can also get that Article comments report one day :)
3
Meg Gunther
I would love to view this video, however there is no external link and when making full screen the quality is awful.
1
Katie Arathoon
Glad that improvements to the guide editor are on your radar! A flag: in the video, I'm not seeing the option to assign guides. We use this feature to note who's saved updates to a guide when it has unpublished changes. That way if one writer goes in and sees it's assigned to someone else, they can reach out to them to discuss the changes / how long it'll be till the update is published, etc.
Without the visibility of the Assign feature I'm worried we'll publish over saved changes without realizing.
1
Katarzyna Karpinska
Hi Katie Arathoon,
You are way ahead of us :) The assignment link will change it's place, but it wont' be removed. If you pay attention to the mock-ups you can find it in the line above article title. When we get to making this change we'll introduce it here as well.
0
Uriah
A lot of my work is done remotely, so I use a laptop almost exclusively on the go.
I would like to suggest that the Header Section be moved not to be locked or float smaller near the top of the Editor to maximize screen space? This would be great and thanks!
5
Julia McKellow
totally agree with Uriah - allowing greater screen real estate for writing by floating the header section would be really good!!!
2
Julia McKellow
Especially now that the tool bar at the foot of the page takes up vertical space - there is now even less screen real estate to use for editing....
3
Tobias Grønbæk Melander
Completely agree with Camilla's comment. While it's very nice that you are addressing the article editor, the UI wasn't the problem with it. As Camilla mentions, it's missing features like
- easily adding Accordions and ToC are what is causing our team to use more time on finishing articles.
In the same vein, we're also missing a feature to easily add lightboxes to images, as we have to enter the source code every time.
And text editor features like rich text editor.
3
C.W. Holeman III
In addition to the Templates mentioned above (and YES PLEASE to those), having the ability to change the default settings would be a real life saver. For example, we never allow comments, but have to remember to un-check that option for every single article. It's a real pain!
2
Shana Blackstone
Having this "Collaborative working (supporting multiple users in the document at once)" from Zoe's first post would be game-changing.
We first draft all articles in Google Docs. After SME review and comments, we copy the content to Guide and reformat it (this is now easier with new Zendesk updates).
We also agree the UI wasn't really that bad. There are just so many features missing. We had to purchase an entirely separate tool to get basic features like find and replace in HTML and across multiple articles.
2
Cécile Luft
Hello, I don't understand these changes with the footer, we don't need the space on the right anyway so why not keep using it to put all the buttons? Right now with the footer, we're losing a lot of space and on a small laptop screen, you only see a few lines of the article (see screenshot, it's not better on a large screen). There's definitely a UI issue with the fixed section of the title, the big footer, etc. We're working every day in the tool and our daily work is impacted.
Thanks!
3
C.W. Holeman III
Cécile Luft is very correct. Y'all have made changes to ensure that there is space wasted by toolbars on all four sides of the editor. That is truly insane, and an unbelievable waste of space. Seriously, can y'all pick a side or two, and move all the buttons to one place? Your product team must either never use a laptop, or never write articles... Some of us have to do both of those on a daily basis.
I mean, look at this: (And yes, I know you can collapse the side bar, but even then, it's using up a bar. You have 3 other sides to move those buttons on the bottom to. Please do so.
3
Heather Rommel
Are there any plans to allow us to do private notes on an article for reviewers and editors? We want to talk to each other without publishing that to the HC on a live article.
Also wondering about linking a Zendesk ticket to an article. A field on the side bar would be fine; where we can note what ticket(s) caused us to create this article. This way reviewers have a source place to understand context.
1
Darren Bell
I am trying to find out how we would activate this button, it doesn't appear in our Guide.
0
Jennifer Rowe
Hi Darren Bell!
That feature is part of Team Publishing and it's available on Enterprise plans.
Hope that helps!
0