Overview

The Help Center editor is where you write articles and organize your Help Center. The rail on the left mirrors the sidebar readers see. The canvas on the right shows your article list or the article you are editing.

Open the editor from Help Centers in the dashboard.

Use the rail

Help Center controls

The top of the rail holds the controls for the whole Help Center:

• Help Center menu: Switch between Help Centers, and open All articles, View help center, Analytics, Importers, Languages, or Create new help center

• Language: Choose the language you are editing, when your Help Center has more than one

• Search: Find an article and open it

Tabs

The Tabs section lists the entries of your Help Center's top bar: your tabs, the API reference tab, and top-bar links. It also has Not in a tab, which lists the content that no tab holds. Click a tab to show its content. To create tabs and links, see Organizing your Help Center with tabs.

A tab's ••• menu also has 'New article in tab', which creates an article directly in that tab, above its collections.

Tab content

While an article is open, the rail also shows these sections below Tabs:

• Articles: Articles placed directly in the selected tab. This section shows only when the tab has some

• Collections: The selected tab's collections, in the order readers see them. Expand a collection to see its articles and sub-collections

• Standalone articles: Articles in no collection and no tab. Readers do not see them in the sidebar and open them from a link, so they suit legal pages and other one-off pages

Article rows marked Draft are not published. A row tagged with a language code, such as EN, has no version in the language you are editing and shows the default language instead.

Use the article list

When no article is open, the canvas shows the articles of the selected tab, and the rail shows only the Tabs section. Use 'New' at the top of the list to create an article or a collection. With a tab selected, a new article goes directly into that tab unless you create it in a collection.

Switch views

Use the pills at the top of the list:

• Structure: The tab as readers see it, with the articles placed directly in the tab first, then its collections in your Help Center's order

• Articles: Articles grouped by publish status: Draft, Unpublished changes, and Published

Find articles

• Search articles: Filter the list by text

• Filter: Show articles by Status, Collection, Author, or a missing language

• Display options: Change the Article ordering and choose which columns show, such as Collection, Author, and Updated

Work with several articles

Select the rows you want, then use the bar at the bottom of the list: 'Publish', 'Unpublish', 'Move' to another collection, or 'Delete'. Publishing and unpublishing apply to the language you are editing.

Search for an article

Press ⌘K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows, or click the search icon in the rail. Before you type, search shows recently updated articles. Type to search, then press Enter to open a result.

To create an article from search, type its title and choose 'New article'.

Edit an article

Click an article in the list, the rail, or search to open it. To go back to the list, click 'All articles' at the start of the header.

The editor saves your draft as you write. Readers see your changes only after you publish. The header also holds the article controls:

• Edited time: Shows when the draft was last saved and opens the version history. See Managing articles & collections

• Access: Choose who can read the article. See Help Center privacy controls

• 'Publish' or 'Publish changes': Make the draft live

• ••• menu: Change the author, collection, or tab, unpublish, open the version history, preview the draft, view reactions, or delete the article

To add steps, tables, and other blocks, type / at the start of a line. See Help Center block library.

Organize articles and collections

In the rail, every article and collection row has a ••• menu. In the list, open it from a collection's header or right-click an article row.

• Articles: Publish or unpublish, rename, copy the link, move to another collection or tab, change the order, or delete

• Collections: Add a new or existing article, create a sub-collection, edit the collection, change its parent, move it to another tab, change the order, or delete

You can also drag rows. Drop an article between rows to reorder it, onto a collection to move it there, or onto a tab row to place it directly in that tab. Drop a collection onto a tab row to move it into that tab. In the list, reordering by drag works in the Structure view with manual ordering.

Open Help Center settings

Click 'Help Center settings' at the bottom of the rail to open Settings → Help Center. There you set the welcome message, the sidebar, article privacy and link behavior, and imports.