Transitioning to the new article editor

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Note: The transition from the legacy article editor to the new article editor will be complete on April 22, 2026. After this date, the legacy editor will no longer be available. See the transition timeline below for more information.

In May 2025, Zendesk introduced a new, enhanced article editor that provides an intuitive and enriched content creation experience, designed to streamline content creation and boost audience engagement. This updated article editor has a phased transition period for new and existing articles, and provides an option for you to continue using the legacy editor until the end of the transition.

With the new article editor, you have access to enhanced editing tools, source code improvements, and advanced article components, such as HTML blocks, summaries, and more. In addition, you can take advantage of newly released features, such as AI article translation, that are only available with the new article editor. For more information see Editing articles in the knowledge base.

To ease your transition to the new article editor, it's important to understand the transition timeline, reason for the transition, and how to troubleshoot issues you may encounter.

This article includes the following topics:

Comparing the legacy editor and new editor frameworks
Understanding the timeline for transitioning to the new article editor
What to expect after the transition ends
Troubleshooting issues when transitioning to the new article editor

Comparing the legacy editor and new editor frameworks

The legacy editor was built using an HTML approach, which worked much like an enhanced text box in your browser. Whenever you formatted text, these actions directly manipulated the content as HTML. Behind the scenes, typing or formatting was translated into messy (or sometimes inconsistent) markup, heavily influenced by your browser and whatever content was pasted in the editor.

The new editor takes a structured data model approach. This means that it translates content into a structured data model, where each piece of content is an object with defined properties, attributes and relationships. This model separates content from data attributes, which is what provides the new editor with so much of its flexibility, security, and ability to integrate with advanced features and tools.

As with any migration to a more advanced platform, there are transition issues and workflow modifications that must be addressed and resolved. Because the legacy editor was built on HTML instead of the more powerful objects, you could customize and add any HTML you wanted in the article editor. As you transition your articles to the new editor, you may find that some of this code is no longer supported, and as a result, your content is wrapped in an HTML block for its protection. Or, you may find that you now are working with tables, images, or other article editing elements in a different way.

Understanding the timeline for transitioning to the new article editor

The transition from the legacy article editor to the new article editor has four phases, from May 22, 2025 through April 22, 2026. Throughout the phased transition, new and existing articles will gradually move from the legacy editor to the new article editor.

Once an article has been migrated to the new article editor, it will no longer open or be editable in the legacy editor. This applies to restoring previous versions as well. When you restore a previous version of an article that was created in the legacy article editor, the article will still open in the new article editor. You can't restore the legacy article editor, even if the article you're restoring was edited and published using the legacy editor.

Refer to the following table for a summary of the transition information shown in the diagram above.

Period	Article type
Period	Existing articles	New articles
New Editor GA Q2 2025	Open in the legacy editor. You can save in the new editor and switch back as needed.	Open in the new editor. You can revert to the legacy editor if needed.
Transitionary period Nov 3, 2025 - Jan 11, 2026	Open in the new editor. You can switch between the new and legacy editors until you click Save and migrate. After migrating, the article only opens in the new editor.
New articles - New editor only Jan 11, 2026 - Mar 31, 2026	Open in the new editor. You can switch between the new and legacy editors until you click Save and migrate. After migrating, only the new editor is available.	Open in the new editor without the option to revert to the legacy editor.
Legacy editor sunset Q2 2026 Transition complete April 22, 2026	Open in the new editor without the option to revert to the legacy editor.

What to expect after the transition ends

The transition to the new article editor will be complete on April 22, 2026. After this date, you'll still have access to all of your articles in the new editor without an option to revert to the legacy editor. All references to the legacy editor will be removed, and the new article editor will be the only available article editor.

If you haven't migrated your existing articles to the new editor by the end of the transition, you'll still have access to those articles but will only be able to view and edit them in the new article editor.

Because HTML blocks protect custom code incompatibilities between the legacy and new editor, your articles should appear correctly when published. However, custom code that is incompatible with the new editor will be wrapped in an HTML block to protect the code. To learn more about how to work with HTML blocks in the new editor, see Using HTML blocks to edit code in content blocks and Troubleshooting issues with HTML blocks in the new article editor.

Troubleshooting issues when transitioning to the new article editor

If you experience issues with your help center content that is moved from the legacy editor to the new article editor, refer to the following Help and FAQs articles: