Guides is a feature that allows you to create your own indexed library of instructive User manuals, built right into the Help Center.

There are three key parts that make up the structure of a guide: the volume, chapters and pages. You can see how the structure will appear to the User on the Help Center demonstrated below.

The Guide will be selected by the User in a dropdown box. The chapters act as headings and the pages are nested underneath and will contain the actual content.

Creating a Guide

To create, manage and edit guides. Go to Publish > Guides in the Agent interface.

To add a new guide, hover your mouse over 'Guides' and select the Add button in the navigation panel:

This will open a Guide creation window in the middle of the screen:

Here you will need to add:

• Title - title of the Guide.

• Icon - the icon that will be used for the specific guide across the Help Center.

• Color - the primary colour used for icons within the guide (you can specify a RGB, HSL or a hex color).

• Description - the description of your guide on the guides landing page.

• Use volumes - you can choose to use volumes. Volumes are useful if you'll have multi levels to each of your guides.

• Splash image - Select a splash image to be displayed on the landing page for your guides.

• Brand - assign the brand you want the guide to appear in.

• User Groups - assign usergroup access to the Guide.

Then select Create to create the guide.

Once a guide has been created, it is now ready to be populated with volumes, chapters and individual pages. Multiple chapters can be nested within volumes, and multiple pages can be nested within chapters.

Pages appear listed in the specified guide index on the User interface.

Choosing to Use Volumes

Volumes add an extra level of depth to the guides in the Help Center.

In the image below we are using a volume:

The Heirarchy that exists is:

• Volume - DETECTING A PROBLEM

• Chapter - MY PILOT LIGHT'S GONE OUT

• Pages - Troubleshooting problems and can you help me out with my pilot light.

The volume provides a more prominant division between chapters in the UI and allows an extra unit to create depth.

You may find in some guides (such as the one you're reading now, for example) that each section does not go down that many levels in which case it works better to just use chapters and pages:

Creating Volumes and Chapters

To create a volume click into your guide and select the Volume + button in the top right:

This will open a creation page:

Here you simpy need to add:

• Title

• Status

• Unpublish date - a date which the volume will automatically be unpublished so it can be reviewed. Note this is optional.

• Parent - the guide your volume will belong to. This will be the guide from within which you selected + volume by default, but you can amend if needed.

Once these have been added hit Create.

Once you've created a volume you can add a chapter into your volume. The process for adding a chapter is virtually the same as adding a volume.

Click into your volume and click the Chapter + button in the top right.

This will open a creation page, where you will need to add title, status, unpublish date and parent. You can then Create your chapter.

Creating a Page

To create a page go into your chapter and select Page + in the top right.

This will open up the page editor:

Page Properties

You will need to add some properties to the page before you begin to add your content.

• Title

• Language

• Location - the page will be placed by default as a child of the chapter you are in. You can amend this though by clicking on the breadcrumbs and selecting a new location.

You can also add search words but this is optional.

Creating Page Content

Creating and editing page content is done using an easy-to-use markdown formatting editor:

The formatting options are:

1. Styling - Use this to add headers (H1, H2 and H3)

2. Bold

3. Italics

4. Underline

5. Strikethrough

6. Superscript

7. Subscript

8. Text colour

9. Highlight Colour

10. Align text

11. Bulleted list.

12. Numbered list

13. Task list

14. Definition list

15. Format code (inline and codeblocks)

16. Quoted text

17. Insert table

18. Insert image

19. Insert link

20. Callout

21. Divider

With markdown formatting, you can either use the toolbar to edit the appearance of text, or use special characters and punctuation in the text interface itself. For example, to create a header you use hashtags. So, "# HEADLINE" is a large header. "## HEADLINE" would be a little smaller, "### HEADLINE" would be smaller still.

Note

If you add Heading 1, this will create an anchor link which will let you jump to the section on the page.

When you use markdown commands using the toolbar, the corresponding special character and punctuation commands appear in the text interface, so you can easily familiarize yourself with markdown formatting.

For more information, refer to this article from the creator of markdown - John Gruber.

Inserting images when creating or editing topics is done using simple copy and paste from web pages, or drag and drop from your own files.

All content created in the text interface automatically generates a preview; visible directly below the text interface. Here you can determine what page content will look like once it has been published and is viewed from the Guides section of your user portal.

Once you would like to publish a page, or want to save it as a draft, select the ‘Create Page’ button below the topic preview.

Managing Volumes Guides and Chapters

Once you have populated a guide with pages, you reorder them as you wish.

Within a chapter you can simpy drag and drop pages to change the order by clicking on the 8 dots at the end of the row the page is on:

If you click into a guide you can do the same with volumes, and if you click into a chapter you can do the same with pages.

To move a page to a different chapter you would need to open up the page and click the breadcrumbs and select a new location for it:

To move a volume to a different guide or a chapter to a different volume you will need to click to edit it:

This will open the edit screen in the application panel from where you can change the parent and hence the location.