Allow articles to be posted to multiple sections

+1

+1 for this. It would be awesome.

Adding the same article to multiple Sections in HelpCenter is "a priority" if you look back at what Zendesk customers are saying in this thread, and the thread for sharing posts in multiple forums. 

When we signed up for Zendesk last month, we were told that "many new features are coming out in the "new" release planned for later this year."

Can you let us know if "this" feature is in that "plan?"

To me, this is not a feature, it's a bug! :o)

Hi James,

I am not completely sure what you have heard, but we will not be changing this anytime soon. Unfortunately it's a rather big change as it affects everything from themes to APIs, which is why it's not something we are focusing on right now. But as mentioned before we definitely acknowledge the use case and it has pretty high priority with us, I just can't say at this point when we get around to fixing it.

Christian,

I am really confused because the conversation we had, I thought that was coming soon. That is a major road block for us. I thought that ability to post an article to multiple categories was just around the corner...

Christian, not having the ability to have this function creates duplicate content.

This function is the most basic one included on any software of this kind. I am puzzled with the fact that it's not even in the roadmap to be released soon...

We are hoping that coming soon is not in the far distant future.  We, too, are counting on this enhancement.

Perhaps the confusion can be traced to previous responses such as "We like this feature so much that we've added it to the roadmap for Help Center."

I'm now a bit confused myself...

+1 for this. We would need this as soon as possible and it is the most painful bug we are experiencing in the whole zendesk.

Hey guys,

Let me try and make this as clear as I can.

We acknowledge the use case and we know that it is something we need to tend to. That being said, we don't know exactly when we will get around to it. In this discussion, I have previously mentioned late in the year and that might still happen, but it's a guess at best.

For knowledge management which this is a part of, we know how important it is to not create duplicate articles. We also know that it's important that you can create more levels and we know that managing your content in Help Center today is rather difficult. We want to tackle all of these things, but our main focus right now is on management. We have chosen that focus first as we believe it will positively affect most customers.

In this concrete case a much improved management experience could potentially alleviate some of the pain your are experiencing today. While it's not a full solution, being able to quickly find all duplicate articles and edit them makes it a little easier to maintain duplicate content until an article can live in multiple places.

Once we have the new management in place, we will start to look into how we can improve the presentation of knowledge in Help Center. This includes looking at the levels we have and having an article live in multiple levels at the same time.

While this might not be the positive answer you were looking for, I hope it has given you some clarity into our priorities, so you can make the decision that fits your needs.

Christian,

It is a bit disappointing because there were a lot promises under delivered.

We had a meeting at your HQ's and the impression was that this was coming soon, here you stated that it was not even being considered and has the thread grows the speech is changing a bit.

Also we were promised to have the KCS widget you showed off to be delivered last week, even if it was on a beta stage. I have a KCS workshop next week and I have no idea how am I going to proceed with our initiatives without that capability.

Hi Tony,

I am sorry if I have not been clear at previous occasions. I do not recall saying it would come anytime soon. Again I would like to reiterate that it is not only being considered - we know we want to add it. We are just focusing on other items at the moment, which I have detailed in my previous response.

Regarding the KCS Widget, I will create a ticket that directs you to the right person, as that is built outside the Help Center product.

Christian,

There is a disconnect here.

You need to get together with Dave and get this figured out. You guys need to connect and be on the same page.

I don't need a ticket for this.

Back to the subject, I was told by you guys that this was a high priority, it looks it's not.

Everybody is asking for this because this request is basic functionality, maybe the biggest bug and miss you guys have in the software.
Maybe your priorities are not in sync with the customer's needs.

To weigh in on its importance, this is a highly visible lack of functionality acknowledged by our organization that doesn't reflect well when we tell our biz owners that ZD currently don't support. Personally I am a huge advocate of ZD and this one makes it difficult to champion the platform.

This post is getting a bit heavy but I love the passion we have for this product. It is great and could easily be so much better. (sentience edited out) This feature is a huge must. I find it hard to believe we can change the agent interface color before coding this feature. Hope to see it soon. Thank you.

The first post about this was almost 3 years ago, the thread was not silent since then. Highly disappointing. Good thing your competitors are way behind and you can afford yourself to not add this super important feature.

@Alex Man: Are you sure? I am already checking out the competition, it might be better option for us.

The last time I checked other solutions lacked other important features/had worse ux. Did you find anything interesting?

Alex,

i would say 99% of of other CRM/KM systems have this feature, it's basic functionality and as far as UX the competition is not that ugly though...

What do you suggest? Which alt?

Zendesk is a great product, even though they are lacking on this basic feature.

There are a few things that we will be testing soon that should make everybody extremely happy once released. Just hang tight and be patient or talk to your CSM.

I see that this feature isn't coming anytime soon, but I thought I'd throw my vote in anyway.  It could be very useful for all of the reasons already mentioned. I think we'll be duplicating some content in the meantime.

+1 on wanting this to be made a priority. In the meantime, I see the Help Center API has been mentioned a few times as a workaround.  Can the Zendesk team provide a detailed example of how to use the API to publish content to multiple articles in the Help Center?

Thanks.

Yes, an example would be great please.

+1 for example

I have figured a workaround and used Zendesk API to show 1 article in multiple sections.

My usecase: we are selling WordPress themes and we have multiple niche themes (around 10 ATM). There are some specific questions for each theme, but most questions are common and related to all the themes (for example How to add Google Analytics to WordPress site). So I created a new section called Common problems and appended the articles from that section to each section of the themes.

Demo - there is a list of sections for each theme, but if you will click to the sections, you'll notice that first there are theme-specific questions and later on all questions from section Common problems.

JS code (mind that I am using Underscore.js):

// fix to display general questions in themes' sections  
 // using Zendesk API  
 // @link https://developer.zendesk.com/rest\_api/docs/help\_center/articles#list-articles  
 (function() {  
 if ( $( '.breadcrumbs a[href\*="200506781"]' ).length ) { // 200506781 is ID of the section for general questions  
 var config = {  
 $articleList: $( 'ul.article-list' ),  
 tmpl: \_.template( '<li><a href="<%= url %>"><%- title %></a></li>' ),  
 apiUrl: 'https://proteusthemes.zendesk.com/api/v2/help\_center/sections/200132421/articles.json',  
 };  

 var appendArticles = function( data ) {  
 \_.each( data.articles, addArticle );  
 };




var addArticle = function( article ) {   
 config.$articleList.append( config.tmpl( {   
 title: article.title,  
 url: article.html\_url,  
 } ) );  
 };




$.get( config.apiUrl, '', appendArticles );  
 }  
 })();  

 // hide dummyhide articles - if section has 0 articles fix  
 (function() {  
 $( '.article-list a[href\*="dummyhide"]' ).parent().remove();  
 })();

Ewwww, this looks ugly. I created a gist instead here: https://gist.github.com/primozcigler/678b74c1e0262a1d4cb7

If there is a larger demand for this I can also write more in-depth tutorial how to do it properly and cover more use cases.

I agree on the feature being a must. @Primoz Cigler Would you be able to write an in-depth tutorial on how to implement your workaround? Totally grateful!

+1 from us as well

Yes please!

Basic tenet of content management/maintenance: duplicate content sparingly; share content where possible.

@Primoz Cigler - this is fantastic! Like several of the others have said, I would absolutely love a tutorial. This would be extremely helpful for me and my company as a lot of documentation needs to be shared in multiple categories.

I'm also tossing in my vote for this becoming a permanent Zendesk feature. I understand and appreciate creating a rock-solid management foundation, but I hope this will be developed sooner rather than later. An agile approach to documentation leads to easier maintenance and increased accuracy, but it's difficult to do with duplicate docs. Thanks! :)