You can access standards to edit them in three ways:
- Navigate in the Articles hierarchy and click on the standard you want to edit
- Search for the standard using the Find Articles search in the lower left of most app pages
- Use one of the filters combined with search in the Manage interface
Either way, once you click on the standard, it will open in an editor screen like this:
As a general rule of thumb, you won't want to touch anything in the editor above the Agency Evidence of Compliance section. (The one exception to this is if you're updating the standard itself because NRPA released new standards.) But for all other edits, ignore the Permalink, the Full Article Title, and within the editor itself, skip the Standard, Suggested Evidence of Compliance, and the Informational reference(s).
Some standards will include that snippet.fundamentalStandard section--this snippet code is added to standards that are considered fundamental/required--it just tells the knowledge base to display the standard title in red. You can safely ignore this now, too.
Required sections
You should focus on three sections in the editor body, plus the Publishing Status:
- Agency Evidence of Compliance: Provide evidence of your compliance to this standard. Most often, this includes narrative.
- Documentation of Evidence: Provide links to documentation that supports your evidence of compliance. This can include files you've uploaded to KnowledgeOwl directly (see The basics: adding documents, files, and more), as well as links to pages on your website (see The basics: adding links to other websites or online resources).
- Agency Self Assessment: Here, indicate whether you have assessed that this standard is Met or Unmet.
- Publishing Status: Once you have fully reviewed/updated this standard and you consider it "complete" and ready for review, change the publishing status to Published.
Standard text formatting tips
As of January 2021, the NRPA Portal does not support bulleted or numbered lists in their editor. Copying and pasting these lists into the Portal will just create new paragraphs.
The Portal editor does not properly paste in superscript and subscript text from KnowledgeOwl. You're welcome to still use these format types, but recognize that you may have to do additional formatting on them within the Portal editor.
Optional/helpful sections
There are a couple editor tricks that may be useful in your workflow, so we wanted to point them out!
Internal note
The Internal Note field in KnowledgeOwl gives you a way to add a note that is displayed between the Full Article Title and the editor. This note is only visible to authors within KnowledgeOwl (it is never shown in the knowledge base itself). It can be a great field to use for notes on what still needs to be updated or reviewed in the standard.
See our general Internal note documentation for more information on using this feature.
View Article link
If you're curious how a standard will display, or if you need to grab the URL of a standard to include it in the Additional Documents Link section of a chapter, click the View Article link near the top navigation. This basically does the same thing as View KB + navigating to the standard you were looking at. It can be a great time saver for "seeing" how the standard looks or grabbing the URL to paste somewhere else.
Tags
Tags are an optional metadata field available at the bottom of the editor. We've found them useful for CAPRA self-assessments in two ways:
- If you have multiple people working to update standards, and you're using a shared account, create a tag for each person who's working in the app. Add the tag with their name on it to indicate which person is responsible for a given standard.
- If a standard cannot be completed until certain processes or documents are completed, create a tag for the process or document, and add it to the standards.
With tags in place, you can create custom filters in Knowledge Base > Manage to pull a list of standards with each tag, making it easy to divide up the remaining work or update all standards that were waiting on something else at once. See our CAPRA-specific documentation on Using tags to track more detailed progress and general documentation on Creating a custom Manage filter for more information on these workflows!
