Help Center: write, review and publish articles

Overview

The ConversaLabs Help Center is your account's public content site. Each portal holds categories and articles, and every article exists in one language — translations of the same article are linked to each other.

This article covers the writer's work: the editor (and the menu that opens when you type /), the draft changes flow on an article that is already live, the screen that compares the draft against the published version, and the tools in the admin lists — search and drag reordering.

The key point is this: on a published article, what you type does not go live right away. It is held as a draft until you publish the changes. On a Draft or Archived article every edit saves straight into the record, because there is nothing published to protect.

Prerequisites

• Access to the Help Center (Portals) in the account, with permission to create and edit articles.
• The article's author must be a user of the account itself. An invalid author is rejected on creation and simply ignored on edit.
• For the article to show on the public site it must be Published, have public visibility and sit in a public category of the same portal and the same account.
• A published article must have content: an empty body blocks publishing.
• Article body limit: 200,000 characters.

Step by step

Create an article

1. Open the Help Center, pick the portal and the language, then click New article.
2. Type the title. The article is created when you leave the title field and starts as Draft, with you as the author, in the category that was open (or the first category of the language), and already publicly visible.
3. Write the body in the editor. Set the author, the category and the article properties (meta title, meta description and meta tags) in the controls below the title.
4. Click Publish once the text is ready. Use Preview to open the article the way a reader will see it.

Write with the slash menu (/)

1. In the article body, type /. The formatting menu opens at the cursor.
2. Keep typing to filter the options by name.
3. Move with arrow down / arrow up (or Ctrl+N / Ctrl+P) and confirm with Enter. You can also click an option. Esc closes the menu.

Options available in the article editor: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, Code, Bullet List, Ordered List, Table, Image, Video and Divider. Link, undo and redo are enabled as well.

• Table inserts a 3-column table with one header row and one data row.
• Divider inserts a horizontal rule and leaves the cursor right after it.
• Image opens your computer's file picker, which accepts PNG, JPEG, JPG, GIF and WebP.

Insert a video

1. Type /, then choose Video.
2. Paste the link into the Paste a video link field and confirm with Embed. The button only becomes available once the link is recognised; Cancel or Esc close the box without inserting anything.
3. Supported links: YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, Wistia, Arcade, Bunny, CodePen, GuideJar and .mp4 files. Anything outside that list is rejected with "That doesn't look like a supported video link".
4. The editor stores the address as a link in the text; the public portal is what turns that link into the embedded player.

Edit an article that is already published

1. Open the article. The editor saves on its own 500 ms after your last keystroke — the header shows "Saving..." and then "Saved".
2. Because the article is published, the text goes into a draft and the site keeps showing the previous version. The header now shows the Pending changes badge, and the article card in the list shows Unpublished edits.
3. Click the Pending changes badge to open the comparison panel. The badge is a button; hovering it shows the View unpublished changes hint.
4. To go live, click Publish changes. To throw the draft away and keep the text that is live, open the menu next to the button and choose Discard changes.

Compare the draft against the live version

The Unpublished changes side panel only shows what changed — if only the body changed, the title block does not even appear:

• The title is compared word by word; what left is struck through and what came in is highlighted.
• The body is compared block by block (paragraph, heading, list, code block). A block only shows as changed when the rendered result changes — reshuffling blank lines produces no difference.
• Fenced code blocks (three backticks or three tildes) and lists are treated as a single block, so they never appear cut in half.
• A block that came in carries a green marker; a block that left is struck through with a red one. The comparison decides on the rendered HTML in CommonMark — the same dialect the public portal uses — not on the raw text; that is why a spacing-only edit produces no difference.
• On very large texts (over 2,000 blocks or words on either side) the detailed comparison is dropped: everything live shows as removed and the whole draft shows as added.
• Tables are displayed with the column widths you set in the editor.

Settings & options

Article status

From Published the menu offers Archive and Draft. From Archived, Draft. From Draft, Archive. The Publish button is disabled on an article that is already published and has no pending changes.

Changing status with pending changes

If you send a published article to Draft or Archive while draft changes exist — from the editor menu or from the card menu in the list — the Unpublished changes confirmation appears with two ways out:

• Apply changes: promotes the draft into the article text and applies the new status.
• Discard changes: throws the draft away and applies the new status.

While either action is in flight, the confirmation does not close on Esc or on a click outside.

Article search

• The Search articles... field sits in the list header and fires 500 ms after you stop typing.
• The term goes into the page address, so the result survives a reload and can be shared.
• Search runs on the server across title, description and content, weighted towards the title, and matches the start of a word.
• With no match, the list shows "No matching articles".

On the categories screen search behaves differently: it filters the categories already loaded by name.

Tabs, filters and pagination

The All articles, Mine, Draft and Archived tabs carry the count of each group. There is no "Published" tab: to work with what is live, stay on All articles and use each card's status label. There are also category and language filters, and the list pages 25 at a time.

Drag reordering

The order you set here is the order in which articles appear in the portal category.

• Dragging is only available inside a category, with more than one article (or more than one page) and with no active search and no bulk selection.
• Press the card and drag. The destination shows as a dashed placeholder.
• To take an article to another page, drag to the left or right edge of the list and hold: after roughly 0.6 s the page turns on its own and you keep dragging. While an edge is armed it lights up and shows an arrow — that is a cue that the turn is coming, not a button to click.
• Near the top and the bottom the list scrolls on its own while you hold the card.
• Esc during a drag cancels the operation and nothing is saved.
• The new position shows immediately and, if the server refuses it, the order reverts and the message "Unable to reorder articles. Please try again." appears.
• When the server accepts, the list adopts the positions it returned, so the next drag never starts from a stale number.

Categories can also be reordered by dragging on the categories screen, and dragging is disabled while a search is active.

Bulk actions

Select one or more cards to open the action bar: Publish, Draft, Archive, Category (move), Translate and Delete.

• A bulk Publish also publishes each article's draft when it has pending changes.
• Bulk Draft and Archive skip articles with pending changes and tell you how many were skipped — open each one to publish or discard. If every selected article has unpublished edits, nothing is applied and "These articles have unpublished edits — open each to publish or discard." appears.
• The selection clears itself whenever the list changes (page, tab, filter or search), so check what is ticked before firing an action.
• Delete asks for confirmation and is permanent.
• Translate only appears on Enterprise installations with the Captain Tasks (captain_tasks) feature enabled for the account.
• Each card's own menu carries the same status changes and, when a draft is pending, Discard changes too.

Use cases

• Fix a live article without taking it offline: edit freely, check the comparison panel and only then click Publish changes.
• Four-eyes review: the writer leaves the draft ready and says so; the reviewer opens the same article, uses the comparison panel and decides between publishing and discarding.
• Reorganize a category: enter the category, drag articles into the order the reader should meet them, and use the edge drag to move an article between pages.
• Clean up old content: on All articles (or inside a category), tick the expired articles by their status label and use a bulk Archive.
• Find a specific passage: use search — it also looks inside the article body, not only the title.

Tips, limits & best practices

• Autosave sends title and body together, so editing one field never drops a recent edit to the other.
• A save that only touches the draft does not change the article's update date. That date only moves when something is written to the record — publishing the changes, or changing the category or the author.
• If the draft becomes identical to what is live, it is cleared on its own and the pending changes badge disappears — that is the case when you undo an edit or only touch spacing.
• If you send a published article to Draft and then edit it, the old draft is promoted and cleared, so a future publish cannot resurrect stale text.
• Leaving the editor with a pending save does not lose the edit: it is sent on the way out.
• Discard changes has no undo.
• Each image uploaded from the editor must be under 4 MB. Above that, "Image size should be less than 4MB" appears and the file is not uploaded.
• Inside a table cell the / menu hides headings, lists, image, table, divider and video: a markdown table cell only holds inline content, and the rest would be lost on save.
• The addresses search, articles and categories are reserved and cannot be used as an article's address.
• Two articles sharing the same position do not swap places between visits: the tiebreak is stable.

Troubleshooting

• The Publish button is disabled. The article is already published and has no pending changes. Edit something, or use the menu beside it to change the status.
• "Still saving your latest changes" appeared. An autosave is in flight. Wait a moment and try again — publishing right then would push stale text live.
• I published, but the article returns a not-found page on the portal. Confirm that the article's category is public and belongs to the same portal and account. Legacy articles with no visibility set are also refused at publish time until a platform administrator classifies their provenance.
• The pending changes badge disappeared after I saved. The draft became identical to the live version — usually because the edit was undone or only touched spacing, which does not change the published result.
• The bulk action said it skipped articles. Those articles had unpublished edits. Open each one and choose between publishing and discarding before repeating the action.
• I can't drag the cards. Check that you are inside a category, that no search is active, that no article is selected, and that there is more than one article.
• Options are missing from the / menu. The cursor is most likely inside a table cell.
• The video link was rejected. The provider is not on the supported list. Host the video on one of the accepted services or use an .mp4 file.
• The article won't save. Check that the body has not gone past 200,000 characters and that the article has content before trying to publish.

See also

• Help Center portal settings
• Administration overview
• Whitelabel (your own brand)
• Custom Scripts: inject JS/CSS into dashboard, portal and widget
• Dynamic variables