Content Blocks

Issue

A customer has setup a Help Center with Articles and Content Blocks in Sandbox

When exporting the articles via api we get an article.json with the content block as html inline in the article. And no wrapper around the content block (e.g.  <div class="content_block">..</div> to easily delete them via Regex

Similar, when uploading the articles in the other environment we lose the concept of content blocks.

And we can't clone the content blocks over.

Few scenarios:

• We do a migration from one instance to another. All content blocks are hardcoded in the html and can't (easily) be identified so are present in the new environment in badly formatted layout
• A customer that has all articles in one section and we clone those to other sections (think: hotelchain with multiple locations) so that people looking at a Hotel Section see all articles for that hotel
• A multi brand customer who has two help centers and we migrate articles from the main one to a white labeled other one for a sub brand.
• Customers want a backup with accurate content instead to copy to sandbox for validation/testing

API

I can understand the injection of content blocks for e.g. APIs that pull in API data to show the data elsewhere (e.g. search integrations)

But for the use cases, the ability to have the "naked" article with Content Blocks as references instead of code are easier to handle/migrate/clone

That being said, an API to update Content blocks would be useful too. E.g. marketing updating the content of Sales CTA Content blocs from Hubspot to Guide.

Guide Metadata or Notes

TLDR

We need a way to add notes or comments to the Admin side of a Guide article to make knowledge management easier.

How would this work?

1. A content editor opens an article in Guide
2. He sees the regular text editor and a new textarea on the right
3. He can edit/update these notes ir review them while updating the article

Example Scenarios

• A customer has a complex article with troubleshooting steps. They want to document the owner of that process next to the article so that if questions arise the person writing the article knows how to reach out to the right person
• An article is referenced in a few important external resources. We want to have these links readily available so that if we update the article we can always check if they are inline with the other content
• An article explains a specific use case and we want to (internally) document the reasoning behind it. Might be because the article explains a problem in a “nicer” way than true underlying technical restrictions,..
• An article has a bad section we need to improve someday. We want to note down suggestions on improving the article for the next time the article comes up for review.

References in other tools

Wordpress

Page & Post Notes

Simple plugin that allow you to notes on pages and posts

WordPress.orgehoff

Zendesk Internal Note

Agents in Zendesk have internal notes to log notes that end-users shouldn’t see.

Similarly, Guide Admins need internal notes to log article notes that readers shouldn’t see.

Google Docs

Google Doc has a comments feature to informally make notes or comments on the document without changing the document

API

Notes could show up as a text string.

// Status 200 OK
{
 	"article": {
		"author_id": 3465,
		"comments_disabled": true,
		"id": 37486578,
		...,
		"notes": "This is a note on the article"
	}
}