Michael Ferry

@Steve

Apologies, I wasn't entirely sure of your relationship to/with Zendesk.

I see what you mean about the formatting of the reusable code but there's a relatively simple way to get around that that I can think of (I'm not suggesting this is the best or only way):

* Have a new category of article that cannot be published. Let's call it a 'snippet'

* Snippets are otherwise identical to articles, and can be formatted as such

* In your article where you require the snippet to appear, a tag or some other piece of mark up is added as a placeholder for the snippet.

* When previewing/publishing the article, the HC expands the markup to pull in the full information from the snippet definition

Here's a simple example/use case. First I'll create the snippet:

--------------------------------------

Name: widget_help

This is some reusable text that explains how to use our widgets. It has formatting applied already.

--------------------------------------

Then let's add it to an article:

Complete Guide

We are a company that provides many different services. Our main line of work is widgets.

{widget_help}

We also provide support

{support_categories}

{etc}

{etc}

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

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I don't think that would be too difficult for someone to understand or use and could allow all of the existing formatting to be preserved. If we then require that same information to appear in a FAQ section, for instance, it's simply a case of creating a new article with the question and the placeholder. If the answer/instructions change, or we have more areas we support, we change them in one place only - the snippet.

 

@Steve Wisemen

I've been watching this topic for a long time now, and made a comment suggesting that dynamic content is the answer way back in July 2014. There's an existing request (from 2012) for dynamic content here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203432686-Use-Dynamic-Content-in-Forums.

Christian seemed to agree that this would be a valid solution, but as far as I know, it still isn't possible? Your comment suggests not. Nor has there been any indication that it's being seriously considered.

Sadly, I don't hold any hope of this happening any time soon, despite the obvious usefulness of it.

edit: Just to clarify, when I say "dynamic", I mean pretty much exactly what you've said when you mentioned "reusable".

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!