Visibility and permissions

You can hide a category from the table of contents, landing pages, article lists (certain categories only), and breadcrumbs. This can be useful for Sharing "draft" articles before making them publicly available, or having resources you only want to direct people to by URL.

To alter a category's display settings:

1. Open the category to edit it.
2. Select the display limitations you want from the Display Settings menu. Different category types have different restrictions options, and the options also vary depending on whether the category is a subcategory or top level category.
3. Select Save.

Display Settings options

This list describes all the possible display settings options and their behavior. The table below shows which settings are available to each category type.

• Exclude from search results: Users cannot find the category through the knowledge base search.
  • This setting will also remove the article from the Recommended tab of Contextual Help Widget (2.0) and from the Recommended section of Contextual Help Widget (Modern).
    
• Hide from table of contents: Category does not appear in the table of contents or the Contextual Help Widget (2.0) Knowledge tab
• Hide from homepage: Category is not listed on the homepage.
• Hide from category landing page: Category is not listed on the parent category's landing page.
• Hide from article lists: Category does not appear on the homepage or the Popular, New, and Updated article lists. This does not affect the Recent Articles List or Article Favorites.
  • This setting will also remove the article from the Recommended section of Contextual Help Widget (Modern).
• Remove "Download to PDF" icon: Prevent readers from downloading this category as a PDF.
• Remove feedback ability: Disable the ratings section in this category, even if they are enabled for the knowledge base overall.
• Remove comment ability: Disable the comments section in this category, even if they are enabled for the knowledge base overall.

Articles within these categories

Articles do not inherit category display settings. You may need to take more steps to fully hide a category and all its contents or to hide individual articles.

• Articles inside a hidden category (one that is hidden from the table of contents, category landing pages and so on), are still available in search. Refer to Exclude a category and all its content from search results for guidance on completely removing a category from search.
• If you want to hide articles inside a category, you can:
  • Mark individual articles as Hide from table of contents, Hide from category landing page, and Hide from article lists (and/or Exclude from search results). If you're trying to hide all articles in a category, you'd need to change this setting for all articles individually.
  • Create a reader group and restrict the category to this reader group (we often use a group called "Hidden" for these purposes!). This effectively hides the category and all its content from anyone who is not a member of that reader group. See How do reader groups work? for more information on working with reader groups.

Sometimes, you need to restrict content to certain groups of readers. For example, you may want some content in your knowledge base to only be available to people at your company, while wanting other sections to be public.

To restrict a category or subcategory to certain readers, refer to the instructions in the reader group documentation:

1. First, create a reader group. 
2. Then restrict the category to the reader group. When a category or subcategory is restricted to a reader group, only readers who are part of the group can access the category. 

Reader group restrictions are inherited by subcategories and articles, meaning that if you apply a reader group to a category, the same permissions also apply to any content inside the category. This means that if you want to restrict everything inside a category, you only need to set the reader group restrictions on the category, and KnowledgeOwl automatically applies the same restrictions to the content inside the category.

Have you ever wished you could exclude an entire category's contents from search, all at once? Maybe you have a category where you include content specific to particular customers, where you provide them a URL and otherwise hide that category from search and navigation. Or, you might have a category you use for Internal Reviews, where you publish things that are in-progress to get feedback from subject matter experts, but you don't ever want your general readership to find those resources.

Search result exclusions are usually set in individual articles. They don't get passed from the category to the articles.

So, for example, if I have a category called Enterprise Resources, and it contains subcategories for each of my enterprise customers, I'd have to manually set each individual article to be excluded from search:

• Enterprise Resources
  • Customer 1
    • Article 1 (exclude from search)
    • Article 2 (exclude from search)
  • Customer 2
    • Article 3 (exclude from search)
    • Article 4 (exclude from search)

Excluding content from search this way can be inconsistent, since it depends on your content creators to remember to check the box in each article or for you to create a reader group restriction.

In the Search Settings, you can fully exclude a single category and all of its content from search results. When you use this option, it automatically excludes from search:

• All articles directly within the category
• The main category (if it's topic display or custom content, which are indexed for search)
• All topic display or custom content subcategories
• All articles in the category's subcategories

So, in the above example, if I set my Customer 1 category to be hidden from search, Article 1 and Article 2 would be automatically hidden, even if I didn't check that option in the articles themselves.

If I set Enterprise Resources category to be hidden from search, all four articles would be hidden from search, as would any future articles created for additional customers.

Exclude a full category from search

To exclude a category and all its content from search:

1. Go to Settings > Search.
2. Next to Excluded category, select the gear icon:
   
3. In the pop-up that appears, start typing the name of the category you want to exclude. You'll get an autosuggested list as you type. Click the category you want to select.
4. Then select Exclude Category.
   
5. Once you've made your selection, click Save to save your changes.

All of the content in that category is now excluded from search.