The Related Articles feature allows you to present a list of "related" articles, topic display categories, and custom content categories to any article or category in your knowledge base.
This can help your readers find other relevant content if the content they're viewing didn't quite answer their questions or encourage them to browse to other content.
Sample Related Articles section in a live articleThere are three basic ways you can use Related Articles:
The display varies slightly based on what type of content you're looking at:
- For articles, the Related Articles section will display by default in the article footer. (You can see ours at the bottom of the page, which is the default display.)
- For topic display categories, the Related Articles section displays at the bottom of the category, after all the articles. No related articles for individual articles within the category are shown.
- For custom content categories, the Related Articles section displays at the bottom of the category, after any content.
- While you can add Related Articles to Default categories and Blog style categories, the section will never display in these category types.
If you're customizing your knowledge base theme, you may want to change where the Related Articles section displays, remove it entirely, or only display it within specific articles.
You can remove the [template("related")] merge code from Settings > Style > Custom HTML > Article and add it various other places to customize your theme.
If you want to remove it globally but only display it in particular articles, see Display Related Articles only in specific articles.
When you delete, archive, or switch an article back to draft status (or delete a category) and it was listed as a Related Article somewhere:
- The article or category will still appear in the Related Articles section of the editor for any content where it was added.
- The article or category will NOT display in the live knowledge base when a reader views this article or category.
We know this can be a bit confusing, but we do this on purpose:
This way, if you end up recovering or republishing the article, you don't have to redo those related article relationships.
And if you know that the article will never be recovered or republished, you can manually remove it as a Related Article in the editor.
By default, all new knowledge bases come with automatic Related Article suggestions enabled in Settings > Basic > Website Settings.
When you use this option, behind the scenes, KnowledgeOwl searches and displays up to ten articles, topic display categories, or custom content categories that have content related to the content you're looking at using the article titles as a match.
Using automatic Related Articles has several advantages:
- You don't need to do any work to show them, so it can be a way to quickly populate resources on a lot of existing content
- You can still use them in combination with manual Related Articles, so you can slowly transition over to manual
You can configure these automatic suggestions in a few ways:
- You can enable/disable automatic suggestions completely. See Enable automatically suggested Related Articles if you've previously disabled it; see Disable automatic suggestions for Related Articles if you'd like to turn it off completely.
- You can decide to only suggest articles that are within the same top-level category as the currently-viewed article.
- You can backward suggest Related Articles.
- You can change the number of automatically displayed related articles, anywhere from 1-10.
See Enable automatically suggested Related Articles for more information on the last three options.
Whether you use automatic Related Articles or not, you can always manually add Related Articles to your content.
Unlike automatic Related Article suggestions, you aren't limited to 10 manually suggested Related Articles. Add as many as you like! (Though more than 10 would probably get overwhelming...)
You can add:
See Add related articles for detailed instructions on adding these Related Articles!
If you use automatically suggested articles and add some related articles manually, the knowledge base will always try to display the number of articles you've specified. Let's say you've kept it at the default (5):
- When you have 0 manually added Related Articles, up to 5 automatically suggested articles will be displayed.
- When you have 1-4 manually added Related Articles, we will display a maximum of 5 articles, filling in the empty slots with automatic suggestions (where we can find them).
- When you have 5 or more manually added Related Articles, only those will be displayed.
Note: automatic suggestions are created using keyword matching between article titles; if the system can't find enough matches, it won't display the full number of articles.
So, for example, let's say I've set the number of Related Articles to automatically display to five.
I have manually added three Related Articles to my article:
Sample related articles in editor
When I view this in the knowledge base, I'll see those three articles first, in the order I selected. Automatic suggestions will try to fill the remaining two spots:
Sample shown on knowledge base
The automatic suggestions help fill this to a total of five, but they aren't always the best resources to suggest. If you want to have total control over what's displayed, you'll want to disable the automatic suggestions across your entire knowledge base.
You can specify which articles or categories KnowledgeOwl displays as related articles within an article or category. The steps differ slightly based on whether you're editing a category or article:
Article Editor
To add a related article in the Article Editor:
- Open the article in edit mode.
- In the Related Articles section, select Add article:
Related Articles' Add article button - Type the article or category title you want to add as a related article. The dropdown autosuggests articles or categories based on what you've typed.
- Select the article or category, then select Add Related Article.
Example of adding a Related Article - Save the article.
Category Editor
To add a related article in the Category Editor:
- Open the category in edit mode.
- In the Related Articles section, select Add Related Article:
Category Editor, Add Related Article button - Type the article or category title you want to add as a related article. The dropdown autosuggests articles or categories based on what you've typed.
- Select the article or category, then select Add Related Article.
Example of adding a Related Article - Save the article.
Once you have two or more Related Articles added, you can reorder them.
In the article editor, reorder them by clicking on the article title and dragging it where you'd like it to go. Delete using the trashcan icon.
Sample reorder in article editor
In the category editor, reorder them by clicking on the arrow icon and dragging the it where you'd like it to go. Delete using the red X.
Reordering or removing Related Articles
