Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
A template gives every new article the same skeleton, which is how a knowledge base written by ten people still reads like one. The mechanism is plain: a template is an ordinary article carrying the label KCTemplate. There is no separate template manager to look for.
Create one
- In your help centre or Knowledge admin, click Add and select Article. An existing article you want to reuse works just as well.
- Enter a Title, and put the type in it so writers can tell them apart.
- Build the skeleton in the body: headings, a placeholder line under each, and any block that always belongs.
- Set Managed by and Visible to.
- Under Publish in section, choose where articles made from this template should land.
- Leave the Author as it is.
- Add KCTemplate in Label, then click Save.
The KCTemplate label does not carry over to articles created from the template, so you do not have to remember to remove it.
The section is a default, not a rule
New articles made from the template are created in the section you chose, unless the writer changes it. Pick the section that kind of article usually belongs in and let people move the exceptions.
Three templates, not ten
You can create as many as you need, which is exactly why restraint matters. Almost every article is one of three things: an explanation of how something works, instructions for doing something, or an answer to a question people ask. Those three cover the ground, and more than that means writers spend their thinking on choosing one.
Put the prompts in the template
Under each heading, a line saying what belongs there. "What the reader must have before starting." "The steps, one action each." Those lines get deleted as the article is written, and they are what makes a template teach rather than merely arrange.
What always belongs
If every article should open with who it is for, or close with related links, put that in the template. A convention nobody has to remember is a convention that holds.
Revisit it once
After a dozen articles, look at what writers consistently delete and what they consistently add. That difference is the template correcting itself, and it is worth acting on once rather than ignoring for a year.
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