08 · Knowledge base

The knowledge base (KB) hosts articles that staff and customers can search and read. Each article has a status: Draft, Published, or Archived. Only Published articles appear on the public help centre.

Where to find it

• Browse / share: Sidebar → Knowledge Base or /kb
• Editor (admin): /admin/kb (linked from the admin sub-nav)
• Public site: https://kb.kwgroup.uk

Requires the kb feature.

The same /kb pages serve two audiences, switched by host + login cookie:

• Logged-in staff at portal.kwgroup.org.uk/kb — the help-centre pages rendered inside the portal shell, so the sidebar/topbar stay visible.
• Visitors at kb.kwgroup.uk — the standalone help-centre chrome (header with search, footer), no portal shell.

Either way the pages read published articles only.

A "🔗 Copy public link" button on KB article pages puts the customer-facing URL on the clipboard for sharing in chat / email / tickets.

Layout (editor)

The /admin/kb page is a tree builder. The left of each row is the category/article tree; the right has inline actions.

+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Tree                3 areas · 12 pages       [+ New area] |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|
| 📂 Setup                  ✎ [+ Group][+ Page] ×           |
|   📄 RMM agent install guide   PUBLISHED                  |
| 📂 How-to                 ✎ [+ Group][+ Page] ×           |
|   📄 How to reset a password   PUBLISHED                  |
| 📂 Internal               ✎ [+ Group][+ Page] ×           |
|   📄 Onboarding playbook       DRAFT                      |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

📷 Screenshot placeholder: screenshots/kb-list.png

The tree shows areas (top-level categories), groups (child categories), and pages (articles). Each article row shows its status badge (Draft / Published / Archived).

Article editor

+----------------------------------------------------+
| Page title                Category ▾   Status ▾   |
| Short summary (excerpt, optional)                  |
|----------------------------------------------------|
| [B] [I] [U] | [• List] [1. List] | [H] [¶] [🔗] [⌫]|
|                                                    |
| WYSIWYG editor…                                    |
|                                                    |
| Attachments (downloads)                            |
+----------------------------------------------------+
| [Save] [Save & publish] [↗ View public]            |
+----------------------------------------------------+

📷 Screenshot placeholder: screenshots/kb-editor.png

An article has a title, an auto-generated slug, an optional category, a status (Draft / Published / Archived), an optional excerpt (shown on listing pages), and a body. Articles can also carry file attachments ("downloads"), shown below the body editor.

View public

When an article is Published and has a category assigned, the ↗ View public button opens its customer-facing page in a new tab. Published articles with no category have no public URL — the editor shows "Assign a category to expose a public URL."

The public URL pattern is /kb/<category-slug>/<article-slug>.

Categories

Manage under /admin/kb/categories (or build the tree directly on /admin/kb). Each category has:

• Name
• Slug (auto-generated from the name)
• Parent (optional — for nesting)
• Position (sort order)

Categories can be nested into a hierarchy of areas and groups.

Search

The KB pages have a Search articles box. Submitting it navigates to /kb/search?q=… and lists matching published articles. Search is a full-text match over article titles and body content (MySQL MATCH … AGAINST over a composite index). It is not a live search-as-you-type field — you submit the form to run it.

Writing articles

The body editor is a lightweight contenteditable WYSIWYG (the same editor used elsewhere in the platform). The toolbar supports:

• Bold, italic, underline
• Bullet and numbered lists
• A heading button (H3) and a paragraph button
• Inline links
• Clear formatting

There is no image upload, code-block, embedded-video, or callout support in the editor. The body is stored as HTML; the public help centre additionally runs it through a Markdown renderer, so Markdown typed into the body is also rendered.

Versioning

The KB does not keep per-save version history. Each save overwrites the article body. The user-guide import (see chapter 30) re-imports from disk, so KB copies of the user guide are mirrors of the source .md files.

Article status

• Draft — work in progress; not shown on the public help centre.
• Published — visible on the public help centre. Setting an article to Published stamps a publishedAt date the first time.
• Archived — removed from listings. The article Delete action in the editor archives the article rather than hard-deleting it.

Branding

The standalone help-centre chrome (kb.kwgroup.uk) uses a fixed "KW Knowledge base" header and footer. There is no per-tenant KB theme editor.

Common workflows

Write a how-to

1. On /admin/kb, open the area you want and click + Page (or use + Group to add a sub-category first).
2. Give the page a title — the editor opens.
3. Pick a category and write the body in the WYSIWYG editor.
4. Click Save & publish.
5. Click ↗ View public to confirm what readers see.

Keep a page as a draft

Create it the same way but click Save (leaving status on Draft). Draft articles don't appear on the public help centre.

Migrate from another KB

There is no general ZIP/frontmatter importer. The one built-in import brings the platform's own user-guide markdown files into the KB — see chapter 30, Bringing the user guide into the KB.

See also

• Bringing the user guide into the KB — the docs sync importer