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Create collections in your Help Center
Create collections in your Help Center

How to create multi-level collections of articles and organize your Help Center.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated this week

Collections are the homes for articles in your Help Center. They organize your articles so people can browse your help content and find what they want.

Multi-level collections give you:

  • Flexible hierarchy - Create up to three levels of collections, based on your specific content hierarchy needs.

  • Intuitive tree folder view - Manage your content effortlessly with a visually organized structure, showcasing relationships between collections and articles.

  • Seamless drag-and-drop - Easily move articles between collections, reorder them, and make other changes as needed. Drag-and-drop simplifies the organization process, saving you time compared to manual reorganization.


Creating and organizing collections

Go to Settings > Help Center and click Add collection.

Name your collection, select an icon from the dropdown menu (or upload a custom icon) and give it a short description. Collection descriptions provide important context for people who scan your Help Center.

Custom icons can be uploaded as JPEG, PNG, or SVG files. SVG format icons offer greater customization as they allow for easy modification of color, but they will be rendered in one single color (monochrome).

For best results, icons should be 48 x48 pixels in size.

Add articles or create nested collections by clicking + Add next to the collection.

Drag and drop your existing collections or articles to reorder them.

You can only add icons for first-level collections. All sub-collections will have the default folder icon.

You can create up to three levels of collections.


Deleting collections or removing articles

Both articles and collections can be removed from your Help Center from Settings > Help Center > Collections. Hover over the article/collection you want to remove and click on the trash icon.

Note:

  • Removing a collection will not delete any articles inside that collection. The collection and any articles it contained will simply be removed from your Help Center and customers will no longer be able to see or search for them, but they will still be in your Knowledge Hub and you can add them to a new collection anytime.

  • Removing an article will only delete it from that collection. It will still be in your Knowledge Hub and you can add it to a collection again.


Customer experience

Web view

Customers can navigate through collections in your Help Center by clicking on a collection card.

They can navigate back to previous collections via the breadcrumbs in the Help Center.

Collections will have an indicator that details how many articles exist within the collection.

Messenger and Mobile view

Customers can navigate through three levels of collections in your Help Center via the Search and Browse feature in the web Messenger and mobile Messenger (iOS and Android).

We do not support this feature on React Native or Cordova mobile apps.

Help Space

The Messenger Help Space shows the home page of your Help Center and displays:

  • The number of top level collections.

  • For each collection:

    • Name

    • The number of collections or articles in the collection (including articles in sub-collections)

Collections screen

When viewing a collection in the Messenger the following details are displayed:

  • Collection name

  • Collection description

  • The number of articles contained in the collection (including in sub-collections)

  • Up to three authors of articles in the collection

  • Any direct child articles

  • Any direct sub-collections with the following details displayed:

    • Sub-collection name

    • Sub-collection description

    • The number of articles in the sub-collection (including in sub-collections)

Empty Collections, or Collections that only contain Draft Articles, will not appear in your live Help Center. Only Collections that contain Published Articles will appear to customers in your Help Center.

Move an article to a different collection

To change the collection a public article is in, open the public article in the Knowledge Hub and go to the Help Center and Collections section on the Details panel.

Then choose the collection (and sub-collection) you would like the article to be moved to from the dropdown selector.

The URL for the article will automatically update to its new location, and any old links will automatically redirect there, too! 🙌

You can also do this in bulk from the Help Center > All articles list.


Public API

Use the Collections endpoints to manage the hierarchy of your articles in the Public API.

The following endpoints are available:

  • List all collections

  • Create a new collection

  • Retrieve a collection

  • Update a collection

  • Delete a collection

The following changes have been made to the collection response object:

  • All previous Section endpoints have been deprecated.

  • The field type which previously returned the values “section” or “collection” has been removed.

  • There is now an additional parent_id field that has been introduced to the collection response. This field is used to indicate if the current collection is within another collection.

If the parent_id field is null, this indicates that the collection is a first-level collection


FAQs

Can I add an article to multiple collections?

No you cannot add an article to more than one collection and this feature is not planned for the near future. You can upvote, comment and subscribe to this feature request in our Product Wishlist.

Can I set the audience for a collection?

It's not possible to display/hide help articles at the collection level, audience targeting but be set at the article level. This feature is not planned for the near future however you can upvote, comment and subscribe to this feature request in our Product Wishlist.


What’s next?


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