Writing and publishing articles

The help centre is the public documentation site attached to your workspace — the place you point a customer at instead of typing the same explanation again. You write and organise it under Knowledge in the sidebar, which is an editor-level area: any editor can write, publish and delete articles.

Knowledge has five sections: Sources, Content, Collections, Branding and Domain, plus a link that opens the live site.

Collections

A collection is a container for articles, and collections nest, so you can have a shallow tree rather than one flat list. The collections screen shows the tree with controls to move entries up and down and to edit them.

Creating a collection asks for an icon, title, description, what to nest it under, and its visibility. There is also a standalone switch for a collection that should exist outside the main tree.

Sort out the collection tree before you write very much. Articles are easy to move, but the tree is what your customers navigate, and a structure invented one article at a time tends to end up with six collections holding one article each.

Writing an article

The Content screen lists everything you have, filterable by locale, collection and owner, with a search box and a further disclosure for visibility (public, hidden from customers but visible to staff, or internal) and state (published, draft or archived). The table sorts by title and shows type, help centre, collections, owner, locale, state, flags and when each was last updated.

The editor itself has a title and a description at the top, then the body.

The body pane offers three modes — write, split and preview — so you can work in plain text, or with a live preview alongside, or check the finished rendering. There is a Markdown toolbar for bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, second- and third-level headings, lists, quotes, code blocks, links, images and tables, with the usual keyboard shortcuts. A / menu inserts blocks without reaching for the toolbar, and you can paste or drag an image straight into the body to upload it.

Two AI actions sit alongside: ask Auralis to draft, for starting from a description rather than a blank page, and improve with Auralis, for tightening something you have already written. Treat both as a first draft. You are the one who knows whether the product actually behaves the way the paragraph claims.

The details rail

To the right of the editor is where an article's identity is set: its slug, state, visibility, collection and owner, plus a language switcher and an add language control for translations. Delete is here too.

Open preview and share links deserve a mention. A share link is an expiring link to a draft, which you can revoke. This is how you get a colleague or a subject-matter expert to check an article before it is public, without publishing it first and hoping nobody finds it.

Slugs, and why you should leave them alone

The slug is the article's address on the public site. A published article's URL is built from the locale, the path of collections it sits in, and its slug.

A slug is generated from the title the first time an article is created, and it does not change when you later rename the article. That is deliberate. A URL that silently changed every time somebody tidied up a heading would break every link anybody had ever shared.

You can change a slug deliberately, and when you do, the old one is kept and permanently redirects to the new one. Nothing that was linked stops working.

There is a matching guarantee on the reading side: an article is found by its slug even if the collection part of the URL is out of date, and the visitor is redirected to the correct address. Moving an article between collections therefore never produces a broken link.

Publishing

An article is a draft until you publish it. Publishing is the Publish control in the editor's sticky header, next to Save.

Visibility is separate from state, and the distinction matters. Public means anyone can read it. Hidden means staff can see it but customers cannot. Internal means it is for your team only. An article can be published and internal at the same time — that combination is a finished, in-use article that is simply not for customers.

Branding and the address

Branding sets the help centre's name, tagline, logo, tab icon and brand colour, with a live preview. Branding is an admin setting rather than an editor one.

Domain covers where the site lives. Your help centre always has a working platform address. To use your own domain instead, enter it, take the DNS record Auralis gives you, publish it in your DNS, and then use check now to verify. As with email sending, allow for DNS propagation before concluding that something is wrong.

Importing an existing help centre

If you are moving from another helpdesk, Sources can import an existing help centre from Zendesk, Intercom or Freshdesk, and produces a report of what came across. The readiness band on the same screen tells you at a glance whether the help centre is live and whether a custom domain is in place.

One thing to know about imported articles: Auralis keeps the original body exactly as the source sent it, and separately stores the sanitised version that the public site actually serves. The served version is not byte-for-byte identical, because third-party markup is passed through a strict allow-list before it is published on your domain. What was removed is recorded and shown to you rather than being dropped silently, and because the original is kept, the published version can always be re-derived.