Knowledge Base

Manage, edit, and reorganize knowledge base articles from the knowledge base panel.

This feature is optional; if you don’t see it in the main menu, that means your administrator hasn’t enabled it yet. Administrators can learn more on our admin documentation.

The knowledge base panel begins in Preview Mode. With some small exceptions, Preview Mode shows what the published knowledge base will look like.

Getting Started

Use the ↗️ button in the top toolbar to see the published knowledge base.

👆 In Edit Mode, use the righthand menu to navigate through the knowledge base.

Use the “Edit” button in the top toolbar to switch into Edit Mode (and back again). If you can’t see the “Edit” button, you should talk to your administrator about granting you the appropriate permissions. By default, agents are not permitted to create, edit, or manage knowledge base articles.

Switching Languages

Use the language menu to view or edit translations of the current page.

If you select a language, in which the page hasn’t been translated into yet, the behavior depends on the state of the page:

in Edit Mode

Untranslated pages are marked with a ⚠️ warning sign:

in Preview Mode

Untranslated pages are only visible to users with edit permissions:

in the published knowledge base

Untranslated pages are always hidden:

Using RSS Feeds

Zammad allows you to subscribe to either the knowledge base as whole or to specific categories. There’s both a public and an internal option to do so.

By default, RSS feeds are disabled. If you wish to use the RSS function, talk to your administrator about enabling the function.

Public RSS functionInternal RSS function

The RSS button of the public knowledge base page is located at the bottom of each page. If enabled, the button will be available to anybody visiting the page.

Editing Categories

You can relocate a category using the Parent menu. Doing so, all of its articles and sub-categories will be relocated with it.

You can delete categories by clicking on the 🗑️ Delete button. Categories can only be deleted once all of their articles and sub-categories have been deleted or relocated.

Granular Category Permissions

Granular category permissions are great to have individual access levels on a role level. Using the granular permissions of a category deactivates the default visibility behavior and applies the permissions you’ve chosen instead.

This allows you to divide user groups on a e.g. subscription level to reduce the information load for users that don’t need the information.

The roles require knowledge base reader permission. Your administrator has to provide the relevant groups with reader permissions for the knowledge base. If you’re unsure, please ask your administrator to configure the role permissions accordingly.

In general, permissions of a parent category are inherited! If you want to grant edit permissions for a sub-category for a specific role for example, set the upper level to “reader” and the desired sub-category to “editor”. The same workflow applies to granting “none” permissions, effectively hiding a given sub-category. The other way round is not possible. A role with “editor” permission has full access to it’s sub-categories, so it’s pointless to limit it’s permissions. “None” permissions also cannot be changed down the tree since there would be no path to access permitted sub-categories. If you can’t select permissions in the table, this could be the reason.

Warning

• Be aware that public answers are always available!

• Knowledge base reader permission means that affected users can see internal answers. This is a potential issue if you’re not dividing carefully!

Editing Answers

The knowledge base editor comes equipped with the same rich text editing capabilities available in the Zammad ticket composer. That means you can use the same keyboard shortcuts to insert formatted text, bullet lists, and more. You can even add file attachments and links!

Different link types

🔗 Weblink

URLs pointing to other websites.

💡 Link Answer

Internal references to other knowledge base answers.

(Will not break if destination URL changes.)

📋 Linked Tickets

Internal references to Zammad tickets.

(Visible only in Preview and Edit Modes.)

🏷️ Tags

Tags can help categorize or spice answers with further words to find.

Please note that tags are visible publicly and can be the same like those in your tickets.

Visibility

Set the visibility of an answer to control who can see an article, or schedule it to be published at a later date. Articles are color-coded according to their visibility:

	Public (visible to everyone)
	Internal (visible to agents & editors only)
	Draft/Scheduled/Archived (visible to editors only)

Using Answers In Ticket Articles

As soon as the knowledge base contains one or more answers, you can use these just like text modules. Instead of :: just use ?? to open the search modal. The search is done full text on both answer body and title in all languages available.

If you’ve found what you’ve been looking for, simply hit your ENTER-Key to load the answer into the ticket article. This way you don’t have to throw URLs at your customer and provide the answer right away.

Loading answers into articles does not replace article content.

Use ?? to find and load knowledge base answers into ticket articles