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Allow articles to be posted to multiple sections

Planned


Posted Jun 29, 2012

It would be super awesome if we had the ability to post a single article to multiple sections. We have a number of different "buckets" that our customers fall into that each have their own specific section. We often times write articles that are german to more than one group of customers but not all groups of customers. As it stands currently we have to write the article, post it to one section, copy it, navigate to a different section and post the article, navigate to a different section and post the article, navigate to a different section and post the article, and then navigate to a different section and post the article. This is also a huge pain because that one article now has 5 different URLs and becomes a nightmare for updating and linking in our marketing materials and / or website. It would be much easier and efficient if we could choose to post an article to multiple sections (even if it were still separate URL's for each).


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459 comments

Likewise I have a need for this feature in Help Center. For me it's mainly about having the same article available under the sections for different products. e.g.

  1. I have sections for Product A, Product B, etc, and would like to list a cross-product article that refers to the interaction between products A and B in both sections.
  2. I have a product family X with sub-products a, b and c. I have separate sections for the sub-products but have articles that are common to more than one sub-product (although not necessarily all)

2


This request here would solve most of the problems you've been discussing above: https://support.zendesk.com/entries/22164846-Usage-of-Dynamic-Content-in-Forums

The only way it would fall down is with articles appearing twice in the search results. It would look untidy but shouldn't cause too many issues.

If you could all go and "Me too!" that, it would be great as that's exactly what we need!

 

1


+1 on this.  We have articles that need to be visible in multiple sections.

2


Any news on when this will happen? With this new change to the way HC searches (with no prior warning of the change), this is now a very high priority.

0


Hey guys,

Unfortunately no news yet.

But I would like to dive in to some of the use cases here. Could some of you tell me a bit more about how you would use this? As Michael has pointed out in his previous comment, there would also be the option of creating text snippets (or dynamic content) that you could use in different articles.

I would love to get some examples where you want a full article to reside in different places to understand how that differs from doing text snippets that you can use in different articles and that you would only have to update once.

If anyone could provide me some feedback on this, I would greatly appreciate it.

0


We have an article on how to setup our Zendesk integration.

 

Should it go in our Integrations category?  or in the Setup area... Both!

1


Any article that belongs in a specific section/category as well as an FAQ-section/category.

Or articles for internal as well as external use e.g.

1


For us, the problem is that you cannot permission at the article level. Therefore, we might have a "West Coast FAQ" and an "East Coast FAQ" section. Some articles within will be unique, but some will be copies. So - we would like to post the same article in multiple sections.

If we could permission at the article level, it would relieve some of the stress, but it would still be helpful to post articles in multiple sections.

1


Articles that explain a process which is used across products.

Examples include:

A tool that is used in multiple products. It really only needs one support document but we would like it to be accessed from different product categories.

Category specific article that also appears in the FAQ.

Being able to create specific "Beginning User" categories that curates articles from the general product category.

 

2


@ Christian - The use case for us is fairly simple. We have several products that all share certain components. Since we restrict Help Center content based on organization attributes (namely, which product an organization has), there's not a practical or user-friendly way for us to deliver this content to our end-users without duplicating articles across sections. 

By creating 2 of the same article, we're stuck with:

  • Separate URLs for us to link to the same content
  • Maintaining the same content in multiple places

Hope this helps.

1


Barry has very accurately described my need as well.  We also have a multi-brand experience and restrict help center content based on user attributes of which products they have.  We need a single article to be accessible under multiple categories/sections based on what a user is permitted to see.  In addition, as others have described, we have content that applies in multiple categories as well as would like to have it available under both so users can find it no matter which one they look in.

2


Use Case: we have one article that we want to live in an FAQ forum as well as under the appropriate Forum about the specific feature, and we don't want two separate but identical articles both showing up in our search results!

1


I have a similar use case scenario to those already mentioned. Dynamic snippets could work as well (perhaps even better), assuming we'll be able to update them in a single place for all instances. 

0


Hi Laura D.  The sign-up-to beta link errors out with following message: "Whoops. That was unexpected... This page doesn't exist."  :(

0


Hi Veronica,

The Help Center API has long been out of beta, you can find all the relevant documentation on our developer site: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/help_center/introduction. 

No need to sign up any more, it's available to all!

0


+1 

surprised to find out it is not an option 

0


+1 from us as well.

 

0


+1 here too

0


Use case example:

We have multiple products, but one registration process for all those products.

Each product has it's own Orders & Sales category, and we want the common registration KB to appear in all Orders & Sales categories rather then duplicating it.

 

 

0


I can't believe this isn't a feature, incredibly disappointed.

0


Any update to this? This is a very important functionality for our company. We'll use it to link FAQs and user "manual" items to the same support docs. It seems like the only work around options right now are to duplicate the articles (update nightmare) or write custom code (maintenance nightmare). Can you let us know how soon we might expect this? Seems like there are many of us who are willing to tell you we'd like it which surely translates into many many more who aren't taking the time to comment.

1


Hi guys,

First off, thanks to everyone who has provided their use cases. It definitely helps us to understand the problems you are facing, so we develop the right solution.

Second, this is not something we are planning to add anytime soon. We acknowledge the use case, but we are simply focusing on other things at the moment. We might be able to touch on this late in the year.

While I understand if that is not exactly the answer you were looking for, I hope I have been clear enough that it's unfortunately not coming anytime soon.

-4


I don't want to sound negative here but....

The ability to post an article to different categories is standard functionality on almost every KB tool I know of.

On another note, articles and categories should have a visibility level, which they don't. We have to rely on the old copy and paste feature. This way we have to actually manage multiple KB's, instead of having one solid silo of information with different visibility levels.

 

0


I agree with all of the folks who see this as a critical feature. We offer numerous help articles across various categories, and many of those articles are relevant to more than one category. They all are subject to revisions and updates as the information evolves, which can happen frequently over the course of a given year. And we strive to keep Spanish translations in sync, as well.

For now, our only option is to create and maintain multiple versions of articles, which is not only a major update and maintenance nightmare (as Sue pointed out), but is also poor content management from a system perspective.

Here's hoping you might reconsider. Thanks.

0


I, too, agree with the need for this feature.  I also have a couple different use cases for this ability:

  1. Duplicating article content under different sections of the same Help Center as most people have already requested.

  2. Duplicating article content across different Help Centers: I am exploring the option of upgrading to the Enterprise Plan in order to take advantage of multi-brands, but in order to justify the increase in per-agent pricing, I would need the ability to duplicate articles across different brands of Help Center.  Manually copying & pasting multiple articles that we tend to update on a regular basis on multiple sites is not scalable for us.

0


Thanks Matt. 

We're also exploring something similar, and facing the same problem.

 

0


This is definitely a need. I have to silo my knowledge based on our clients as the data in some cases is sensitive and does not apply to all clients, but applies to more than one.

1


Bump for this amazing feature request!!!

1


This says it's planned but the last official comment from Christian Colding gives the impression that it really isn't. Could someone clarify?

2


Hi Peter,

I can understand the confusion. We acknowledge the use case and in that sense it's planned and something we want to work on. But we don't have specific time lines at this point in time.

-1


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