Organising the knowledge base — categories & folders
For the helpdesk teamOrganising the knowledge base
Section titled “Organising the knowledge base”Above each KB article sit two levels of grouping.
- Category — broad subject area. “Working tickets”, “Estates”, “Portal basics”. There are usually 5–10 categories total.
- Folder — a sub-group within a category. “Lifecycle” within “Helpdesk configuration”. Folders typically hold 5–20 articles.
The split exists to keep the portal’s /help browser readable. Without folders, a 50-article category becomes a wall of text. Without categories, every folder fights for attention at the top level.
Creating a category
Section titled “Creating a category”Click New category on the solutions index page.
- Name — sentence case, short. “Working tickets”, not “How to work with tickets”.
- Description — optional one-liner shown on the portal’s
/helpindex. - Order — lower numbers appear earlier. Default 100 is fine for new entries; bump it down only to promote a category above existing ones.
You don’t need many categories. Five is a healthy maximum. If you’re adding a sixth, ask whether the new article actually fits into an existing one first.
Creating a folder
Section titled “Creating a folder”Click New folder in the same screen.
- Category — pick the parent.
- Name — sentence case. Match the language of the folder’s articles. “Lifecycle”, “Routing & SLA”, “Insights”.
- Description — short. Often unused.
- Visibility — 1 = Everyone (including anonymous visitors at
/help), 2 = Logged-in users only, 3 = Agents only (hidden from the portal entirely). - Order — lower first within the category.
Visibility matters
Section titled “Visibility matters”Folder visibility cascades to articles inside it. A “Confidential” folder set to visibility 3 keeps every article inside hidden from the portal, even if individual articles are flagged audience-all.
This is the easiest way to bulk-hide a set of articles during a rewrite — set the folder to visibility 3, edit the articles, set it back to 1 when you’re ready.
Gotchas
Section titled “Gotchas”- Deleting a non-empty folder leaves the articles orphaned. They still exist in the database but show up in no category tree until you reassign each one.
- The sync script (
php artisan help:sync) creates categories and folders lazily from article frontmatter — you usually don’t need to create them by hand. Use the admin screens only for editing visibility, order, or descriptions.