🎉 Article editor redesign: Opt in for early testing!

As we've been teasing in our Roadmap, we've been hard at work on a complete redesign of the article editor, and TODAY'S THE DAY WE GET TO SHARE IT WITH YOU. 🎉

We aren't forcing you to use the new editor out of the gate. Major redesigns like this can be really jarring and we wanted to give a testing period where those of you who are curious can opt in and those of you who don't want to change until we drag you kicking and screaming into the new editor can wait. So today is the first day of our owlficial testing period!

(We will move everyone over to this editor once we've finished our feedback improvements, though, so it's probably to your advantage to check out what's coming and offer some feedback!)

Try it for yourself

You can opt in to trying the new editor at any time. You can switch back to the "old" editor if you hate it. But we really hope you'll opt in, test it out, and give us your feedback, whatever that might be.

To opt in:

1. Open any article for editing.
2. Select the Try it out link in the banner at the top of the editor:
   Select Try it out in the banner at the top of the article editor
3.  The page refreshes to the new editor and you can test away!

Video walkthrough

If you don't want to commit to trying it before seeing it, no worries. Check out my video walkthrough:

If you prefer reading, just keep scrolling. Everything in the video is mentioned below.

What's changed

Almost everything. But that would be a short and unhelpful release note, so let's dig in!

Less clutter, more focus

The old editor displayed every setting and control everywhere, all the time. This was overwhelming for new authors particularly.

We've created a collapsed lefthand navigation in the editor so you get more screen real estate for the editor itself and so we could provide more information in the righthand column.

We've gotten rid of nearly all that old grey background for the top section and the righthand column to make the page feel lighter and more open.

The old editor could feel very busy with lots of blue hyperlinks to things at the top of the page. We've tucked a lot of unused fields into a triple dot menu in the upper right, so if you can't find something, check here:

Once you add these fields, they'll appear in the editor for that article, but we default to hiding things you aren't using to make it easier to focus.

A smaller, gentler righthand column

Besides changing the background color of the righthand column, we've reorganized the options there into three sections:

• Top, unnamed section: This contains the usual suspects of important things you might access often: publishing status, versions, published date, author, New and Updated callouts. We also moved required reading up here. The versions section gets a much more condensed treatment with the benefit of a pop-out modal to navigate through versions.
• Permissions section: Reader group restrictions, Author team settings, PDF exports, and version access all appear in this section. We've removed the separate sections for reader groups and tweaked the logic so you only have to manage a single section modal rather than three different possible sections.
• Other: Most of the settings from the lower half of the old righthand column, as well as many of the fields tucked into the triple dot menu in the upper right have moved here.

We've also made each of these take up less space by tucking most of the edit function and controls into modals. Select or click anywhere in the text next to a section to open the modal to change settings.

We removed the URL redirect setting from the righthand column. You can now access it through the triple dot menu next to the Permalink, which includes an option to access Old links.

Improved textual clarity

We've renamed a few concepts in the editor:

• Meta description is now called Summary, and it's above the editor.
• Internal note is now called Author note.
• Restrict Viewing to Reader Groups, Inherited Reader Groups, and Add More Restrictions are all under Read access in the Permissions section.
• Restrict Editing to Author Teams is now under Edit access in the Permissions section.
• Remove "PDF" icon is now Export access in the Permissions section.
• Make Visible to Groups is now Preview access in the Permissions section.
• Remove feedback ability is just Feedback in the Other section.
• Remove comment ability is just Comments in the Other section.
• All the Hide from... options are grouped together under Visibility in the Other section.

All of the modals to edit or update settings include brief explanations of what the feature does combined with links to relevant settings or Learn more links to relevant support documentation.

Fun interface improvements

We took this opportunity to update some user interface elements and make them better. In no particular order, here are some highlights:

Editor toolbar/controls

• We added a new Insert dropdown to the editor toolbar in case you're bad at remembering which icon inserts which thing.
• On larger monitors, the text in the editor pane won't go full-screen. It will wrap and break at the same size as your live knowledge base article, so it functions as a better preview of how the content will look live.
• We moved the text formatting control very close to the beginning of the editor, since it's the most-used control.

Other interface delights

• Internal note Author note editor includes a streamlined editor instead of requiring raw HTML and gives you a preview of what the callout style you selected looks like.
• The Status dropdown now includes subsections to better indicate which publishing statuses qualify as Draft, Published, and Inactive, and includes color coding within each section. The Link to Article and Related articles lookups include those same publishing status subsections and colors.
• The Versions list now opens in a separate modal and has a variety of options for what you can do with versions, rather than forcing you to open a version before you can complete most actions.

Get help with the new editor

We're slogging away at updating all of our existing help documentation. Pages we've updated will have tabs for new editor versus old editor. It's a lot of updates, so bear with us! But we've tried to update the documentation you're most likely to need, so the Learn more links are probably a great first step.

If you have questions about where to find something or how to do something, especially if we haven't yet updated our documentation, you're always welcome to contact us or submit feedback.