Writing and Editing Articles

Knowledge Base

Articles are at the very center of HelpDocs. Here's how to make the most of our article editor, and make your articles great.

52 docs by 2 team members

3 docs

Stale Articles

Mark articles as stale so your team knows exactly what needs updating even if they don’t have all the information they need right then.

22 docs

Text Editor

Learn how to get the most out of our custom text editor to create new articles that help customers or your team.

4 docs

HelpDocs AI

Draft articles and rewrite them to watch them soar. Quickly add meta descriptions, tags, and customize the style and tone.

Featuring an Article

Featuring is a great way to promote your best and most important articles in HelpDocs. Here's how to make an article the star of the show. ⭐

We've built a ton of knowledge bases for ourselves and others and in our extensive experience you can usually get by with just one level of categories. Though sometimes you might want to add a few more.

Using help.new to Create Articles

Power user? Use help.new to create new articles from anywhere on the web.

Exporting & Backing Up Your Articles

At HelpDocs we take regular backups of all your data, so you don't need to worry. That said, if you need a copy of your data for any reason, it's super easy to grab it from our API.

Filtering Articles

Need to narrow down the list of articles with certain attributes? You can filter your articles to find what you're looking for. 🔍

Incompatible Browser Extensions

Sometimes our article editor and your browser extensions just don't get on. 😣If you're using Grammarly, Beeline Reader, or ad blockers, read on.

Deleting an Article

Deleting an article from your Knowledge Base is a quick and easy process. ✋ Be careful though—once deleted there's only a limited time for you to get it back.

Creating Draft Versions of Published Articles with Working Copy

Create multiple changes to a published article without disturbing the current live version.

Duplicating an Article

Duplicating an article is a quick way to create a new article with the same content and settings as an existing one.

Bulk Editing Multiple Articles

Sometimes you want to update multiple articles at once without going in and out of each one. With bulk edit inside the content view, you can. Go forth and update. 🧙‍♂️

Exporting Articles to Word

Need to work on your article in Word? We've got a way to export one or multiple articles into .docx format.

Exporting Articles to PDF

With PDF article export you can take your knowledge base offline. We'll automatically make them readable, print friendly, and nicely formatted. 💅

Hiding Articles from Public Search Engines

Sometimes you don't want your docs to show up in search results pages. Here's how to discourage search engines from indexing your knowledge base 🤖⛔

Understanding Search Results

We're constantly improving our search algorithm to get you the best results, but it's not always enough. If you want to improve your search, there's a couple things you can do. 🔎

What is Readability?

In the article editor you'll see a readability score. This is a measure of how complex your article is to understand. 1 is super easy to understand, whereas 14 is very difficult.

Collaborating on Articles with Presence

We've built real-time presence indicators into the product to help you work as a team. The days of overwriting each other's work are gone.✨

Adding a Table of Contents

If you're writing guides or long form articles you might want to add a Table of Contents (TOC). This makes it way easier for people to navigate your article. 👏

Restoring Deleted Articles

Sometimes when you're in the zone you can get a little trigger happy, we get it. If you've deleted your article recently by accident I've got good news—you can restore it. 🥳

Editing Category Metadata

When you start out with HelpDocs and create a category for your articles, you can customize a few things about its URL and appearance. We call this metadata. Here's what all this metadata's about.

Delete a Category

Now and then you might need to delete a category. Perhaps you've restructured your docs or maybe you've just created a category you don't need by mistake.

Hidden Categories

When you create a category for the first time, you might not see it on your customer-facing knowledge base. That's because we only display categories that contain published articles. 🙃

Linking to a Part of an Article

Sometimes you'll want to send your customers to a specific part of an article. Here's how.

Previewing Articles

We all want our docs to look just right. If you're writing or editing an article and you want to check how it looks on your HelpDocs before publishing it, you can preview it from the article editor. 👀