Popular Articles List

Our Popular Articles List displays articles with the most views. This will increase your readers' engagement and your ability to get them the most common answers they might need. By default, we display this on your home page.

How does it work?

Wherever the popular articles merge code is used, KnowledgeOwl will search behind the scenes to pull a list of the articles with the highest number of views (as displayed in the Popular Articles Report in Reporting > Dashboard), sorted with the most views at the top. You can also Reset article views in the Popular Articles report.

A "See more..." link at the bottom of the list will take you to a full page of all Popular articles, located at /help/popular-articles (or /home/popular-articles or /docs/popular-articles depending on which root path you've chosen). You can see ours here: https://support.knowledgeowl.com/help/popular-articles 

Out of the box, this list will display 5 articles. If no articles are available, it will display the text "None". If more than 5 are available, it will include a "See more..." link.

You can choose to display up to 10 articles and can change the article list heading, the New Articles page heading, "None", and "See more..." text. To update any of the text, use the options in Tools > Customize Text in the Article Lists Knowledge Base Section. See Customize Text: Article Lists for more information.

Change number of articles in the list

By default, the 5 most popular articles (those with the most views) will be displayed. You can change this to display between 1-10:

  1. Go to Settings > Basic.
  2. Scroll to the Article List Settings section.
  3. Click on the dropdown next to Popular Articles and select the number of articles you'd like the widget to display (1-10).
  4. Be sure to Save your changes.

In our default themes, the Popular Articles List is already added to:

  • Your knowledge base home page
  • Your 404 error page
  • Your default right column HTML

If you'd like to add it somewhere else, or if you've customized the HTML and no longer see the list on the pages listed above, review the directions below to add it! You'll need this merge code:[template("pop-articles")]

Add the Popular Articles List to all articles

You can place the popular articles merge code in the HTML of all articles. Go to Settings > Style > Custom HTML and select Article. You can place the merge code after the article body merge code or in the hg-article-footer div.

Either of these locations will display at the bottom of each article.

You'll probably also want to add a header to display above the popular article links as well and perhaps a div with a class so that you can style the list.

Something like the following should do:

<div class="pop-articles">
 <h3>[translation("article-lists:popular-articles")]</h3>
 [template("pop-articles")]
 </div>

Add the Popular Articles List to individual articles

If you only want to display the Popular Articles List in certain articles you can place the popular article merge code at the bottom of individual articles. To do so, edit the article and click the Code button in the upper left of the editor toolbar.


Scroll to the bottom of the article and paste the merge code.

You'll probably also want to add a header to display above the popular article links as well and perhaps a div with a class so that you can style the list

Something like the following should do:

<div class="pop-articles">
 <h3>[translation("article-lists:popular-articles")]</h3>
 [template("pop-articles")]
 </div>
Pro-tip: If you do this often, you can create a snippet that holds the above HTML and insert the snippet into your article, instead!

Re-add the Popular Articles List to the right column of your Knowledge Base

If you've removed the Popular Articles List from the right column of your knowledge base, you can re-add it by copying the relevant HTML from Default Right Column HTML and pasting it into Settings > Style > Custom HTML > Right Column.

Re-add the Popular Articles List to your home page

If you've removed the Popular Articles List from your home page, you can re-add it to by copying and pasting the relevant HTML from Default Home Page Article HTML into either the code view of Knowledge Base > Home Page or into Settings > Style > Custom HTML > Home Page.