How to set customized default templates for Knowledge Articles

[Casper Van Coes]

Hello ServiceNow Community,

Our team would like to have a standardized format for our Knowledge Articles so the appearance is similar and easier for consumers to read.

We created templates with custom formatting in the sys_template table but we have not been able to find a way that will force users to start creating a new article in the template formatting.

We tested in dev with Knowledge Management 2.0 which has templates applied through an interceptor page which have limited customization options. However, the KM 2.0 templates seem to mostly be sections/buckets for knowledge article content.

Our team believes that updating the target/behavior of clicking on the options in the KM 2.0 Interceptor page to lead to an article form with a template applied would achieve our goal.

Does anyone have experience with forcing the use of custom templates in Knowledge Articles? 

Thanks!

[Andrew Truett]

We use a somewhat simple setup:

Custom templates for various types of articles (How-to, KCS Article, What Is, Software Descriptions, etc.), and use the settings in the Knowledge Base's record that determine which templates are available for each Knowledge Base.

Along with that, we have a custom CSS that is applied to the articles at presentation. Of course, we do have to perform some manual tweaking of the HTML in our articles sometimes in order to remove some of the HTML that users occasionally add that causes the CSS to be over-ridden, but as I said, our setup is simple-- i.e., no custom coding done to strip out non-conforming HTML, etc., from the articles' source HTML.