Articles are especially useful when you have content that suits better a longer form, such as a knowledge base article. Creating articles in Inline Manual is easy. In just a few minutes, you can add to your widget a list of articles to provide in-app help for your users. Make articles more engaging with images and videos, and launch them from any place in your application. Your users will appreciate the in-app help you’re providing.


In this tutorial, we’ll describe how to create an article and when to use it.


New to Inline Manual? Check what you need before you create an article

To create articles in Inline Manual, you need to install the authoring tool in your Chrome browser. If you haven’t done this already, please click here to add the authoring tool as a Chrome extension.


You will work with the authoring tool to add and edit the content of your articles. Now, let’s create one in just a few simple steps!


Creating an article

To add an article:


  1. Go to your application, the one you want to create an article for.
  2. Enable the authoring tool in your browser. You can start creating the article. Click + Create on the menu to add a topic.


  1. Choose a topic type - Article and fill-in the required fields.


Fields explanation:

* Title - the title of your article. It will be also visible to the end-user in the widget.
* Owner - you can select the owner of the topic if you work with a team. By default, it will show your account.
* Visibility in the widget - choose hidden if you don’t want to show the article immediately to your users. Remember, that in order to show any topic created, the Inline Manual player needs to be implemented.
* Privacy - it’s within Inline Manual portal, privacy settings won't affect your users.
* Language - select a language of this topic.
* Description - enter a description, what is this topic about.
  1. Click Create topic to confirm adding an article.
  2. The article is now added to your site! You can now create the content using the editor. Make sure to click the Save button when ready. You can see how the article will look like in the widget using the Preview button.


  1. By default, the article will be added to the Site but not to the Widget. Navigate to Sites > Site > Widget and add it. It will look like this:


  1. You can also place a launcher (a tooltip, hotspot or text button) to open an article from any part of your application. Learn more about launchers here.

After clicking the launcher, the article will open in the widget:



Customization

We’ve built Inline Manual to be very flexible when it comes to making it look exactly as you wish. Feel free to customize it so that it matches your brand’s identity!


Enhance your articles with the WYSIWYG editor and editing the HTML directly. Make them more engaging with media, and custom buttons. While adding images, you can mark Expandable option if you want the image to expand when clicked. It is especially useful when you have bigger images. This way, the image in the article will remain small, but the user will have the option to view the full picture for more details.



As we already mentioned, when you add an article, it will appear in the widget by default and load right there in the widget. You can reorder the list of articles or hide them from the list. If you have a long list of articles that you can put into categories, we recommend using folders. You can also open an article from a launcher.


When to use articles

Use articles to provide in-context help for your users. You can create short articles answering the most popular questions, but also longer, educational articles that will help you to onboard new users. You can place article launchers in known trouble spots of your application, and make chosen articles in your widget only visible in certain /paths/ on your site. Read more about context paths here.


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