article templates, add in stock text so that the creator can modify it

[roly2409]

Hello, 

i am using article templates and I see largely it's for formatting the user text and making sections with new formats. my issue is I'm trying to add stock text into the article template fields, the body, so that knowledge creators can modify it as they see fit. is this possible?

in the attachment, I was able to make two article template fields," summary" and "how to ". the content under the created fields was manually entered for testing.

thanks,

Rolando

[Leri Andrews]

Hi

Yes, it's possible to pre-fill fields.  I have several different templates for different purposes, all prefilled a little differently and with bespoke help text (see the blue box in the attached image). They are all translated too. It was a significant piece of work to get it working - e.g. If you have your chosen language as Swedish to work in the platform, but you're creating a French article then the help text needs to be in Swedish but the prefilled fields should be in French. Tricky to write a story capturing that for a developer to pick up.

In the 'How to' template, the short description is prefilled with HR [Enter Country] - How to [Enter Action] and then subsequent fields also with suitably formatted text for users to replace.  The title of the field is displayed in the article as a H3 header and the preview must be configured to show the actual results once the CSS is applied and not what the TinyMCE thinks you've done. You can see from the preview attached, that even though the field titles were in German for the author, the resulting article has French headers.

Even with all this effort to create bulleted lists, tables and even anchor tags to pre-written headers and with CSS applied so that boring black and white tables get given coloured header cells and alternate grey and white rows I am afraid you will still get authors choosing to delete it all as their first action upon entering the template.

[roly2409]

Hi Leri, 

very interesting and helpful. so I guess my next question would be how would you create templates like the one in your example, where the short description is filled out for the content creator to modify and the body of the template fields to be pre-filled with info?

currently, i am able to create a template and template fields along with adding in the formatting for the particular fields just not able to actually create a custom template tailored to a specific type of article.

[Michael QCKM]

Roly,

We use the "Template in a template" via the Toggle Template Bar function.

• In order to see it, you need to click the 3 ellipses in a Knowledge article.
• Select “Toggle Template Bar” to show it at the bottom of the screen.
• At bottom right, click plus sign.
• Populate all of the desired fields. NOTE: you can show/hide fields in the template, but those fields must be available to the Form.
• For the Article Body, (Text) Field, add the HTML to generate the desired content
  
• We created some Groups to permission specific Templates for specific Groups, so groups only see what templates they have access to to eliminate the noise.
• Once created, users with access would Toggle Template Bar and select it from the bar at the bottom… it would auto-pre-fill the content with your template data, allowing them to complete it.