John Baker

Christa Beach I hear you, and just wanted to say that Help Center Manager is a plugin in the marketplace (from Swifteq) that lets you export articles to multiple file formats (perfect for content audits and content project tracking), and there's a find and replace feature that's pretty in depth too! You can search and replace on text, syntax/code, and more.

Hoping that after 5 years this request is still being considered.

Tip: The list of results from the Manage Articles screen does copy/paste nicely into Google Sheets and the Articles are linked to the Zendesk pages. We've found that helpful in a pinch, but it's still not an ideal workflow.

As others have mentioned, a true article export would be really helpful in conducting content audits and managing large-scale content update projects. The current review workflows are fine for day-to-day tasks of managing content (author>review>publish>update). But, I think what we're really after is a way to analyze content from a macro perspective. 

We're using the Zendesk APIs to help accomplish what we need for now, but there's a fair bit of customization and tweaking and it's never quite what we needed. 

Example: 

Report with the following columns:

• Article Title (linked)
• Available Translations
• Author 
• Section
• Category
• Labels

We use this spreadsheet to keep track of translation coverage. Folks can also filter on columns to review a subset of content they may be responsible for. For Author, Section, and Category, we need to make sure that we've mapped the IDs that the API returns to the actual values (tedious). We might also take an export and add new columns for a specific project, like mapping articles to related training materials that are not in Zendesk.

Another report we've needed (and I'm wrapping up building) is a way to search article content for specific things (text, attachments, etc). Example of how we are using this report: A legacy translation issue came up so we needed to quickly find articles with specific text, and then assign those articles to one of several different writers to assess how the content might need to change. There are over 120 articles to assess, and this isn't a simple search and replace since the translation may be appropriate in some cases. I can save a list in the Manage Articles screen, and I can share the list (to all admins and agents which is not desired), but I can't track and report progress (status, assessment, etc) in that list. The current review tools are lacking for larger content initiatives.