Allow articles to be posted to multiple sections

@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! :)

@Zendesk peeps, considering this was submitted in June 2012 and has been requested by so many customers, can we get an update on where (if at all) this is on the development roadmap?

Thanks!

Interestingly, there is a "Planned" button shown on the very first post in this topic. I wonder how many customers Zendesk loses because it cannot support a basic feature of a CMS...

Then again, search and replace is a basic feature too. Maybe that is better starting point. :o)

Hey all,

My update from May 22nd is still valid. We are still working on improving management and hope to have the very first beta out next month.

I have decided to remove the Planned label for now. While it's planned in the sense that we want to do something about it at some point, we do not yet know exactly when.

Seems like we're going backwards on this issue.  This has been a pain-point for me now at two different companies. I am generally a big fan of Zendesk, and extol its virtues to anyone who will listen.  But this really impedes the ability to organize content efficiently without duplicating it.

I don't mind copying content to use in multiple categories, but I wish the duplicates wouldn't show up in the search results.  Whether the search is from the Help Center or Web Widget by a customer, or from the Answer Suggestion app in the Zendesk dashboard by an agent, articles posted in two categories show up twice in the search results.

It seems like a simple check box in the article edit section that would hide the article from search results would work for us.

Personally, I would much rather see ZD address the root instead of spending time applying bandaids to the problem.  Please allow articles to live across categories!

Hi Veronica and Mike,

We will definitely not do bandaids. While that can provide a quick solution, it often causes more problems going forward. Generally we prefer to build sustainable features that solve the problem correctly.

@Mike West - There are two issues with copying content into multiple categories:

1) Duplicate content.  This is a huge design no-no for any kind of data management system.  It quickly becomes an administrative nightmare trying to keep things in sync.

2) As you mentioned, we get duplicate search results when we copy content into multiple categories.  We've tried to work around this by using {{search_in_category}} on category pages that correspond to user roles. There is also an "everyone" category, into which articles that apply to everyone are placed. 

We do not present a search box on the home page, and make the user select a role before allowing them to search.  That avoids the duplicate search results, but also means that none of the articles from the "everyone" category are returned when they search.  If they want search results from that category, they have to navigate to it and search again.

I'm now weighing whether or not it is more detrimental to the user to deal with duplicate search results, or to have to do 2 or more searches in order to get the information they're looking for.  No matter which route I take, there will be pain points, and it will be necessary to educate the user on the peculiarities of how our Help Center works.  

@Christian - Unfortunately, as users, we have to do bandaids.  This thread has been going for 3 years, and there is still no solution other than bandaids.  It seems like there is definitely demand for this feature.  Can you share why it hasn't been implemented? Maybe it would be less frustrating for folks if we knew the nature of the obstacles.  I, otherwise, love the product.  But, this is  a particular pain point. Thanks.

I don't want to sound like a jerk but as a startup company we are finding populating our KB to be a large issue with Zendesk. We have been looking at changing to a new CRM and a integrated support system and KB is starting to look better each day. Many of them offer these types of functions. I truly love Zendesk but as we grow, Zen does not.

I hope you can listen to the community that helped make you amazing.

Starr,

I'll gladly tell you more about some of the problems we are seeing. I should point out that we don't see these problems as blockers to building a solution, but they are challenges that need to be addressed.

Help Center was never built with the intent to have content in multiple categories/sections. When it was released 2 years ago we did not know that this was needed. If we did, at least we decided against building it - perhaps because it would have significantly delayed the launch of Help Center. Unfortunately I wasn't around then, so I don't know the exact reasons why it wasn't built.

Either way, Help Center now uses categories and sections to organize content. These categories and sections are tightly integrated with the article itself, so unfortunately we can't easily add it. We would have to completely rebuild how content is organized which is a big task - a task we would prefer to do right, so we don't just create new problems that we can't solve.

We could potentially just duplicate the article to another section, but then votes, comments and metrics would be different for each article, even though they are actually the same. While that would solve the problem partially, we are introducing problems with just keeping track of you best performing articles as metrics are now split between two (or more) articles and comments will also be split in two.

So we do believe it should somehow be one article. When it's one article in different sections we start to ask ourselves what we do with breadcrumbs on page. Obviously, if you've clicked your way to the article, we could probably show the right breadcrumbs, but if you search or access the article directly, we need to determine what to show.

Another problem is access restrictions. If this is truly the same article in different sections, it could have conflicting access restrictions, so which access restrictions do we respect and is it clear to both companies and end-users why they can or can't see a certain article?

On top of that we see a need to create more levels then just categories and sections. Some only want one level. It's confusing which features are available for categories and which for sections.

So lots of problems we need to take care of. We therefore need to take a holistic approach to all of these problems to make sure we are building the right thing. We have some great ideas and I spend a lot of my time working out how we can do this, but until we get everything settled we are focusing our engineering resources on a completely new knowledge management application which is a holistic solution to the many content management problems we also have.

I hope that gives you a peek into some of the challenges we need to work out.