Using HTML blocks to edit code in articles and content blocks



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Elizabeth Williams

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited May 22, 2025


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10 comments

This is Really Quite Unacceptable!

 

I was super excited for this update, until I started using it. The forced HTML code blocks are utterly atrocious. Every single one of my agents has complained about it! It's terrible!

 

As numerous others have already stated above:

  1. Trying to make the most basic tweak to anything results in an uneditable block of HTML.
  2. Pasting just about anything from any other source results in an uneditable block of HTML.
  3. This has destroyed our ability to maintain our knowledge base!

Most of my people don't know HTML! Forcing my agents to learn a new language is just not going to happen. Every single one of them is back to the legacy editor.
 

I have already seen a sharp decline in the quantity and quality of articles that are being produced  since this editor update was released. I can already see the wasted hours.

 

Whoever was in charge of this design decision needs to take a good long look at how they're making choices. This is a case of one step forward, three steps backward! The ability to add an <hr> is the best part of this update. And that's a pretty sad statement.

 

We often have to pull content from other sources, such as an old knowledge base that we're migrating into Zendesk, or other files from a wide assortment of places. If anything that we copy and paste into the editor has any kind of styles or unsupported anything in it it now renders the entire page utterly uneditable! The only workaround is to do a paste-as-unformatted which completely strips out all the important formatting like headers, lists, and italics. At which point my agents have to completely rebuild every line of pasted content one by one.

 

In summary: FIX THIS FAST! You are costing us money!

 

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+1 to everyone else's negative feedback. I go into the HTML to create admonition / callout boxes, and up until the new editor, I've always been able to quickly modify the copy inside the admonition box by editing it in the WYSIWYG editor. 

With this new update, I now have to go into the HTML view every single time I need to see what the original text inside the box is, and to make edits. This is very frustrating and time consuming every time I need to edit the article. Not to mention, if I need to format the text inside the box, I now have to write this out as HTML rather than using the options available in the WYSIWYG editor / keyboard shortcuts. 


This feature is a huge step back in making things more efficient for myself and other writers, and I like to consider myself a Zendesk Guide power user. Please allow all text to be visible like it was with the legacy editor while in the WYSIWYG editor.

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I agree with some of the other complaints. It's ridiculous to force ALL the plain text into one of these blocks simply because one word or element has basic HTML applied to it. 

 

For example, I have a series of 10 steps in an article. In step 1, I have an inline icon image that I applied a class to. Because of that, all 10 steps get automatically jammed into an HTML block. And as a result, we can no longer perform basic texts edits on the steps - we now need to go into the HTML editor to update the text, manually add new steps (<li>), etc. This is absurd and opens the door to wasting MORE time that it's saving. 


One of our help centers is internal with a large group of non-savvy contributors. We can't expect them to suddenly all know HTML if someone needs to add some very basic code to a single element in a section.

 

And on top of that, it doesn't even seem necessary. I found that if I unlink an HTML block, it says it will remove certain code but it doesn't. It does, however, remove the HTML block from the editor while leaving everything else intact. So this seemed like a decent workaround at least - the HTML I entered worked just fine and the content appeared as it normally does in the editor.  Until I found that the next time I went into the full HTML editor, made any other unrelated change and clicked Apply, those HTML blocks came right back.

 

Please don't force this feature on us in its current state. It's going to require us to either remove / go without all the simple HTML we've been using up to this point without issue or keep it and resort to much more manual and labor-intensive editing. 

 

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This is a very frustrating feature. It's putting simple html, such as markup-bullet points, into an HTML block. Then I am forced to do simple text edits within the code editor intead of the front end wysiwyg. 

I can't seem to find a way to turn it off, or remove it, or make it STOP inserting in my articles. 

I was excited about some other features that were added, but this one was so frustrating that I am going to make sure i use the legacy editor. I cannot stand this. 

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This isn't correct with the new editor, is it? It should be applicable (for Articles) for any with Guide, right?

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HTML blocks are wreaking havoc on my code blocks. I use an LMS to manage translations for Zendesk articles, and every time I import a translation back to Zendesk now, code blocks that use angle brackets get swallowed up by an HTML block.

 

Really not a fan of this feature.

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Hi 4594924564378 ,
Thank you for this question. At the moment the HTML blocks are only available in Content blocks, which are an enterprise feature (we have updated the banner at the top of the article). Later this year they'll be available also on lower plans in the article editor. 

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Is this available in the Professional Plan?  I don't have the ability to add a content block in Professional but the header to this article shows that this is available in all plans?  

 

How do we use this if we can't create content blocks?

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I tried to edit the HTML code in a content block (only trying to add two special characters not supported by the WYSIWYG editor). After saving, all the content in the content block was converted into the HTML block and is no longer editable in the WYSIWYG editor. Is this expected behavior? I have no control over what content gets put in the HTML block. 

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Thank you for adding this feature. Very helpful.

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