Articles

Support Operations documentation page for Zendesk articles

Change management

Keep in mind, all change management should be stemming from an issue, first and foremost.

Creating a new article

You will first need to get the managed content file in the Support managed content project. Remember to use the correct filenames for all of this to prevent potential pipeline errors in the sync repo project later on.

After you have got the managed content file in the Support managed content project all setup, you now need to go create a placeholder article within Zendesk itself (as you will need the ID for the sync repo). To do this, access Guide, click Add in the top-left corner, and then click Article. Doing so will open up the article editor page.

On this page, you will do the following:

  • Set the Title of the article to “Placeholder for ISSUE_LINK” (replacing ISSUE_LINK with the link to the issue you are working out of).
  • Set Managed by to Administrators
  • Set Visibile to to Agents and admins
  • Set Public in section to GitLab Support > Support Pages
  • Ensure the checkbox by Open for comments is unchecked
  • Ensure the checkbox by PRomote article is unchecked
  • Set the Owner to yourself
  • Set the Author to yourself
  • Ensure the Labels box is empty
  • Ensure the Related to box is empty

After doing so, click the blue Save button at the bottom-right of the screen. You will then locate the placeholder article you just created via the List Articles API endpoint. How you do this exactly is up to you, but generally speaking something like this will work:

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curl -ss https://gitlab.zendesk.com/api/v2/help_center/articles \
  -u $ZD_USERNAME/token:$ZD_TOKEN \
  | jq '.articles[] | select(.title == "ARTICLE_TITLE") | .id'

Replacing:

  • ZD_USERNAME with your Zendesk user’s email address
  • ZD_TOKEN with your Zendesk API token
  • ARTICLE_TITLE with the title of the placeholder article

From here, create the merge request in the sync repo project. We highly recommend referencing the already existing files to get an idea of what the new YAML file will need within it.

Updating an existing article

Updating an existing article is considerably easier than creating a new one. Simply change change the code in the source project and it will occur via the sync repo.

Deactivating an article

To deactivate an article, you will simply change the article file in the source sync repo project via your merge request. Ensure you merge request does the following:

  • Moves the file from the data/articles/active folder to the data/articles/inactive folder
  • Set draft to true

Source Projects

Zendesk Global

Zendesk US Government

Last modified January 30, 2024: Updating readiness docs for accuracy (62083eea)
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