Categories

To add a category to your top level content, go to Knowledge Base > Articles and click Add Category in the First Level Content column.  You can choose between a variety of category types which change how the landing page, or URL, for the category is displayed. 

Choose Quick Add to create the category and return to Knowledge Base > articles to add more content. Choose Add and Edit to go to the category editor.

To add a sub-category, first click on the top level category where you want to add the sub-category, click Add Sub-Category, and continue the category creation process. 

When you create or edit a category, you can choose between several different types of categories. Category types can be changed at any point in time by editing the category. 

The types of categories control :

1. How the category landing page appears in the knowledge base
2. How the category looks and functions in the table of contents 
3. Whether or not you can have sub-categories within the category
4. Whether or not this category will pull and sync content from another knowledge base

The five types of categories in KnowledgeOwl are:

1. Default
   Displays articles in a simple list. Choose one of three sub-category display formats: title and description, sub-category panels, or content list. 
2. Blog style
   Display a paginated list of articles with brief descriptions. Can only contain articles.
3. Topic-based
   Displays the full text of all articles in a single page. Can only contain articles.
4. Custom content
   Create a landing page from scratch like an article. This type of category will be available in search.
5. Shared content
   Copy and sync a category and all its contents from another knowledge base.

The default category type is the most common choice for organizing and displaying content. You can create both sub-categories and articles within a default category.

The landing page for a default category will automatically display the following:

• Full category title
• Category description
• Sub-categories in one of three display formats
• Articles in a simple list with the title and description

The three sub-category display formats are:

1. Title and description
   Displays category titles and description in a simple grid format with 3 categories to a row.
2. Sub-category panels
   Displays category titles in panels matching the home page base category panels with 3 categories to a row. Example: KnowledgeOwl More Help Category
3. Content List
   Displays the title of each subcategory with a list of links to the first five sub-categories or articles in the categories. The total number of sub-categories and articles are displayed in parentheses with a link to view all. There is an option show all child content rather than the first five. Example: KnowledgeOwl API Documentation Category

After you set up your category, new content added within it will automatically be displayed in the chosen format.

The default settings for a default category are:

• Title and description sub-category display type
• Toggle option in the table of contents

If you choose to Quick Add a category, it will have the settings listed above.

Topic-based categories are a new, special category type that displays the full text of each article. Readers can view all its articles on a single page, reading it like a book or choosing which articles to read.

Example: User Management Guide

For example, you might have an FAQ page with 20 frequently asked questions and answers. If you set this up using a topic-based category, you would create the topic-based category and then create the 20 FAQs as 20 separate articles. 

When someone wants to read your FAQs, they can browse to the topic-based category and view all the FAQs in one place. However, when someone searches for one of the FAQs, the individual FAQ article comes up in search, giving them the answer immediately rather than sending them to the FAQ page and requiring them to browse to their question.

Besides FAQs, longer documentation with multiple steps or sections are often good candidates for topic-based categories. Some readers might want to view the full documentation in one place like a guide, whereas others might just need or want help with one section or step. Breaking up the documentation into separate articles in a topic-based categories allow people searching to get straight to the step or section they need while people who wants to view the documentation in full can use the topic-based category page. 

Topic-based categories:

• Can only contain articles
• Can be displayed accordion style, with each article collapsed below its title and clicking the title expands the content
• Can have quick links, or a mini table of contents, at the top of the article that link to each article on the page

The blog style category displays articles in a similar way to a blog - reverse chronological order and paginated. The blog style category:

• Can only contains articles
• Has a special icon in the table of contents
• Does not display its articles in the table of contents
• Can display 5, 10, 15, or 20 articles per page (the default is 10), 
• Can be displayed as the same set order as the application (the default is reverse chronological)

This category type is particularly useful for announcements-style categories (changes, release notes, newsletters, etc).

Custom content categories allow you to create your category landing page from scratch, much like an article. Like an article, custom content categories are included in search results. A custom content category is both an article and a category.

To automatically display the contents of the category like a default category type, you can use one of two merge codes:

1. [template("content-list")]
   The template content-list merge code will display sub-categories in content list format.
2. [template("panel-list")]
   The template panel-list merge code will display sub-categories in sub-category panel format.

Both merge code will display a simple list of articles with titles and description below the sub-categories.

The share content category allows you to pull in and sync the content from a category in a separate knowledge base. You must have access to both knowledge bases to setup this kind of category.

This category type is useful when you are maintaining separate knowledge bases and have certain content that needs to be shared between them. Updating a synced article updates the content in both knowledge bases, so you only need to maintain one set of articles.

The original category is called the parent, and the synced category is called the child. When new content is added to the parent category, it is automatically added and synced in the child. Only content created in the parent category will be added to the child – content that is moved into the parent will not automatically appear in the child.

Content can be deleted from the child without affecting the parent. 

When a reader clicks on a category in the table of contents, the default behavior is for the category to toggle open and closed to show and hide its content. This is called progressive disclosure in user experience, and helps maintain focus by reduce clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload.

If you would like clicking the category to navigate to the category landing page, edit the category and choose Navigate under the Table of Contents Options. You can also choose to hide the contents of the category.

You can hide a category from the table of contents and other navigation by editing a category and choosing Hide from navigation under Content Restrictions. 

Articles inside a hidden category are still available in search. To also hide articles inside the category, you can create a reader group called something like Hidden and restrict the category to this reader group. You could alternatively mark the articles inside as Hide from navigation but you need to do it one by one.

To restrict a category or sub-category to certain readers, create a reader group and restrict the category to the reader group. When a category or sub-category is restrict to a reader group, only readers who are part of the group will be able to access the category. 

Reader groups restricts waterfall, meaning that if you apply a reader group to a category, the same permissions will also apply to any content inside the category. If you want to restrict everything inside a category, you only need to set the reader group restrictions on the category as the restriction will automatically be applied to the content inside the category.

When you delete category, it will also delete all the content inside the category. If you want to delete a category but not the content inside it, move the content inside before deleting. 

If you delete a category by accident or need to bring back a deleted category, you can use the API to switch the status back to active or contact support so we can do it for you.

Custom content categories are the only categories that show up in search since they are treated like an article. If you are using default, blog, or topic-based categories, they will not show up in search results.

By default, KnowledgeOwl will not display empty categories to readers. If you have a category with no published articles available to the reader, the category will be hidden from the table of contents. Users can see empty categories by default.