🥜 Nat'l Peanut Butter Cookie Day bugfixes

We have prepared another helping of tasty improvements and bugfixes to celebrate National Peanut Butter Cookie Day! Grab a glass of milk, because there's lots to chew through today: 

Tasty, wholesome treats: Recent improvements

Automatic Anchors for heading + copy to clipboard on hover

If you've been manually creating anchors for headings, this addition is SO MUCH TIME-SAVING.

You now have the option to have your knowledge base auto-generate anchor links for all headings on a page. When a reader hovers over the heading, a # displays, and they can click that # to copy the link to the anchor.

We have this feature turned on here in the Support KB, so hover over any heading on this page to try it out!

To turn this on in your existing knowledge base:

1. Go to Customize > Website.
2. In the Links and navigation section, check the Header anchors checkbox to Display a # next to each article heading that copies a link to that section when clicked.
3. Be sure to Save your changes.

(Don't worry, more official support documentation is forthcoming, but this has been such a highly-requested feature we didn't want to delay it with docs!)

Have you seen our beautiful new modals? 

We've released new modals for when you create new articles and categories, and they look so nice and clean!

We've remove the horizontal modal in favor of a more vertical modal, and the controls for working with the article or category type you selected now appear directly under that option, instead of being tacked on to the bottom of the modal. For example, if you want to copy from an existing article, you now choose which article directly within the modal:

Sample Copy from existing article modal options

The category modal also has layout samples for some of the category types if you hover over the info icon!

Alt text for images added to the Files Library

Adding alternative text to any images in your knowledge base is considered an accessibility best practice. But one of the pain points we've run into ourselves with alt text is that you had to add it into each article you've used it in.

We've been exploring ways to streamline this process, and we just released our first enhancement.

Now, when you edit an image in the file library, you can add a File description for the image:

Sample File description field on the file details

When you insert that image from library into an article or category, we automatically add the File description as the image's alternative text. For example, the image displayed above will look like this in the underlying HTML:

<p><img class="img-responsive" src="//dyzz9obi78pm5.cloudfront.net/app/image/id/6849cd1ec2d7c49e1c048bbb/n/potato.jpeg" 
alt="close up of a white dog who very much wants your cookie" style="width: auto;">
</p>

As the helper text explains, this won't update alt text for places the image has already been inserted, but you can copy that file's description and manually update it (or remove and re-add the image to those articles--they should pull in the new alt text once you do so!).

Additionally, if you insert an image that doesn't have a File description in the Files library, or if you upload a new image directly into an article, the image will have an empty alt tag added unless you manually add one in the article.

Default categories with Content list now support category descriptions

Default categories with the Content list subcategory display type have a new Content List Option: you can now choose to Show category descriptions.

If you check this box, the category description will display between the category's title and the content list, for example:

Sample Content List subcategory with category description displayed

Ew, why is there a raisin in my cookie?: Bugs we've fixed

Recovering revision within a version 

If you tried to recover a recent revision within a version, it would throw an error. Yikes! We've solved that now, so you should be able to recover recent revisions in versions to your heart's content.

Creating a new article from a template

After we released the new article creation modal, a customer discovered a bug when creating an article from a template there. If you chose to create the article via a template, you'd receive a "missing fields" error and it wasn't created. Thanks for the quick report so we could fix this before we even announced the modal change!

Errant magic wand in the article editor

Magic wands are great, but not when they don't work!

New trial accounts have our Linus Assist feature enabled to try to help them overcome blank page syndrome. This feature lets you generate an article's body from the title--something that's very useful for creating test content but not as useful for actual content, so we don't enable it by default for existing customers (though if you want to try it out, contact us and let us know, and we can enable it!).

Recently, the Linus Assist icon appeared in all article and category WYSIWYG editors even if the feature wasn't enabled. We've fixed this now, so you won't see the Linus Assist magic wand unless you actually have access.

Change to the suggest API endpoint

Thanks to a recent performance blip, we discovered an oversight in the suggest API endpoint. The search phrase field is required, but we weren't properly enforcing that requirement. We are now, so if you've been using this endpoint for integrations or other custom development and you make an API call to the endpoint that doesn't have the phrase field, you'll receive a "Search phrase required" error.