Help Center Article Editor needs to support (easy) source code formatting
I'm currently testing out the new Help Center before we migrate over. From what I can tell, the new WYSIWYG interface for drafting/editing articles has been cleaned up and hopefully is less buggy than the previous version (e.g., text randomly getting displayed with blue backgrounds). However, one feature has been removed and will undoubtedly cause some serious pain points for our agents in easily creating help articles: formatting options, specifically for source code.
Previously, the WYSIWYG drop-down menu for "Preformatted" would allow us to set in grey-boxed code blocks. Now, the only option is to open up the "Source Code" pop up and edit the HTML, a rather tedious process that seems to format things inconsistently in relation to the previous method. I want to stress that I'm not advocating for the previous article editor. Because our support frequently involves reading/writing code (both inline and block style), the Markdown capability in tickets has been great, and we wish this were an option in the Help Center. Currently, I don't even seen where you can use preset header styling.
Since we're hoping to leverage the Help Center's "Self Service" model more, we really need these features if we want to supply pro-quality support pages that are truly helpful , without it being so cumbersome for our agents to create them. Will Markdown be available at some point? Or better yet, plugin support for additional editor features (code/syntax styling)?
Do you have any suggestions/workarounds that lend themselves to a good workflow in Help Center regarding this type of formatting?
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Commentaire officiel
Hi All,
Thank you very much for all the comments in this thread. I can see that there are a few requests over here, namely:
- Code blocks with language detection
- Markdown
- Call-outs (pre-defined styles for code, notes, alerts, etc.)
- In-line code
- Unification of the experience with ticket editor
I'll start with the last one. We are working on changing the rtf technology powering our editors to make sure that we provide the same experience across all the products. At this moment we have already unified the ticket editor and the content block editor and in 2023 we'll move the article editor to it as well.
Changing the rtf technology will allow us to implement a lot of changes to the content creation experience that should address some of the needs raised here.
For example, you can already see in the Content block editor you can see that the code block is allowing language-sensitive formatting. We also started supporting markdown in Content block editor, you can read more about it here. We plan to extend this functionality the article editor as well.
The last thing that I'd like to address here is advanced article components (like pre-formatted alerts, notes, info boxes). It's definitely on our roadmap and we hope to start working on it sometime next year. You can always check our roadmap here.
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I agree 110% I really liked that option in the old one as I have posted several articles with source code on my portal.
Arnor Baldvinsson - Icetips Alta LLC
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Markdown support, please!
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what are the editor options? right now, what i see seems super limited and is frustrating for content professionals trying to use Zendesk. Any other options to upgrade the editor, markdown, or a better html editor?
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Also, is there going to be a way to install some sort of plug-in for code examples, such as Prettify etc.
We need something that allows syntax highlighting of source code snippets.
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@Diana - Yes you can use JQuery plugins for this. I've installed a few.
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@Wes - Thank you!!!
I can't wait to implement syntax highlighting.
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@Diana - Glad I could help and let us know how it goes and what plugin you decided to go with.
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Hi Wes,
Looking at the instructions: " Click 'Customize design' then 'edit theme'. You will see a workspace with tabs on top load up." I cannot find a "edit theme". What am I missing?
Best regards
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Hi Arnor - I think you posted this to the wrong article however I will provide you an answer here. What plan are you on as you can't customize themes if you are on the Starter Plan.
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@Wes - could you please plugin examples? What do you use to be able to use code blocks.
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@Anton - There are a few plugins out there like Highlight.js and Prism that should work however I normally use the embed from GitHub or Gist.
You can see an example here.
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Adding our vote for source code formatting in the Help Center article editor. The exact features we are looking for were written by Christian Colding of Zendesk here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/222554808/comments/249098547
TinyMCE now has an excellent official 'Code Sample' plugin: https://www.tinymce.com/docs/plugins/codesample/ It would be wonderful if this could be added to the Help Center editor. Please :-)
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I works very well in tickets. Frustrating that those are not available in Article.
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Hi All,
I appreciate the feedback. We've gotten a number of requests around code formatting for the Article Editor. I've recently taken over the Article Editor and I've tried to prioritize small scale improvements to the Editor every quarter. For example, we just released Headings and Video Embedding for videos. I will take this request around code formatting into account as we continue to make improvements in the coming quarters. The next feature we have in the queue for implementation of the editor is linking between articles. I don't have a timeline for when we'll get to this feature yet but we are looking to make overall improvements every quarter.
Thanks!
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Thanks, Ryan. There are numerous requests for anchors scattered around the Community.
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Hi All,
I realized I made an off topic statement here. In responding to a different post I forgot to update the content to reflect the content of this topic.
Thanks!
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Hi Ryan,
you can see the solution that Tom offered
"TinyMCE now has an excellent official 'Code Sample' plugin: https://www.tinymce.com/docs/plugins/codesample/ It would be wonderful if this could be added to the Help Center editor. Please :-)"
this seems like a simple implementation that should not span over "quarters" as you suggested. This is blocking our development of the HC and forcing us to look else were for documentation purposes.
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Hey @Rom,
You're right that improvements such as code formatting are typically smaller than other features we build and release. However, we have a number of priorities in a given quarter and have specific things that we need to deliver on for our customers and Zendesk as a business. I'm trying to prioritize some of these editor of features as we work on other things to keep pace with requests from our customers. So I will take your request under advisement, but I can't promise a given timeframe because I don't have the resources to deliver on it right now.
Thanks!
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Also please add a full editor to the Category and Section editors, and allow HTML.
I created a new request.
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+1
The lack of code snippets is a major factor in our hesitancy to use Guide. Please add them!
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Hey Maria and Niclas -
We appreciate your feedback. Please be sure that you've used the voting buttons on the original post - those votes do count!
As Ryan indicated a couple of weeks ago, this functionality is on the radar, though there are no immediate plans to implement it as there are other developments that have taken priority at this time. But, we will keep this thread open and will continue to accept feedback on it.
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Please please please prioritise this. This is not the only thread or request on this subject.
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+1
There is no workaround that will work in my environment so we are waiting for this feature to be implemented ASAP.
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I'm currently evaluating ZenDesk Guide as a knowledge base for our company, for potentially both internal and external docs. The lack of a code sample formatting option could very well be a deal-breaker, as we have a LOT of code samples and command line examples in our current documentation. Our target audience is developers so they'll want code samples.
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Was also thinking of migrating to Zendesk Guide and put ALL documentation there but as technical company there's plenty of code in multiple languages we need to present to our users. If we cannot do that then we're better off with our current do-it-yourself documentation platform and using the rest of the Zendesk products also make little sense.
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+1 for Code Samples. This will be a great first step. But what we really need is custom style creation and selection. I have a need for Notes, Warning, Error, and Code. At this point, we are stating to look at other options for our KB because it is far to costly (time and resource wise) to get our articles they way we want them.
NOTE: I have posted the same request for at least 5 different threads that all ask for this capability now.
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Hi Chaz -
Thank you for sharing your feedback here. I've catalogued all of the threads on this topic and passed that along to the Product teams, and we'll be working toward closing the other threads down and pointing them all to this one.
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Adding my voice for code samples as a requirement. You do it in the ticket editor, why not in the Guide editor?
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Adding my vote as well.
This is such a common functionality, especially for something that's supposed to be a Knowledge Base...
How do you not have this yet???
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