More flexible knowledge base design and layout, including custom HTML/CSS
There have been a number of different posts in the Community which are about the same core need (customizing the styling of the knowledge base), but many have been marked as "solved" or "delivered" because of options that get you part-way there. I'm consolidating those into this post so we can more easily track this need. This post should not be marked as solved or delivered until a knowledge base can be fully customized in layout and styling.
I've spoken with many customers who still want more flexibility in knowledge base styling, including:
Custom layouts for index pages and articles
More fonts and styling options to better align KB with the rest of a business's website
For those of us who are working to improve the HubSpot product, it's incredibly helpful to have example use cases from our customers, and the posts here on the Community play an important role in our prioritization process.
Giving you more flexibility in KB styling is something we'd like to do, and when we have the bandwidth to dig into this project we'll look to you all for guidance on how to best support your needs. So if customization is important to you, please add your voice to this thread!
For reference, I'm listing here the other posts which are related to this topic:
Hi all! I want to thank everyone for continuing to comment on this idea. We have read every comment, and the details shared here have all been so, so helpful in understanding how we can make the KB tool better for you all.
It’s been a while since an update has been shared here, so just dropping a note to say that this idea is “In planning” at the moment, and our engineers are actively building this feature.
We are unable to share a timeline or subscription level, but updates will be posted here going forward if you'd like to follow along.
If you are interested in talking to our team about this feature or giving feedback on the KB tool, please fill out this form. I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to speak with everyone, but the answers provided in the form will be a great help!
Thank you again for supporting this idea. We are looking forward to making more flexible KB customization a reality at long last! 🎉
I’d like to share an update here since it has been a while since we did last time. I wanted to let you know that we are currently investing in improving our editing platform more broadly so that in the near future we can revamp the editing experience within Knowledge Base. More a matter of when we can get to it, not if. We’ll share another update as soon as we have new information.
Thanks for mentioning this! We're just switching over from Zoho and doing an update for our whole KB to partially for internal reasons, partially to align the differences in formatting options between Zoho and Hubspot. I was happy to see you mention the ability to insert an image into a numbered list since we have many "how-to" articles which require images for multiple steps.
I am currently becoming quite frustrated with how the bullet point/ number point system works. Is there a tutorial or something I can use to figure out how to create a smaller set of bullet points? E.g. if I have steps 1,2,3 but step two has 3 parts to it.
Being able to change background colour, height etc of the nav bar would be useful - One client has had to change their logo to fit in with the white background rather than changing the background colour. Please give us more flexibility on what we can change on this.
This functionality would potentially be the difference for staying with Hubspot or not. The KB is a key component of our support model moving forward and being able to customise it is crucial.
I agree with @Andy_Mantle, and would even take this idea one step further to adding a cascading menu in left panel for the user to easily navigate between Categories, Sub-categories and Articles. This is basic KB functionality.
I just got a request from a client (full growth stack Sales, Service, Marketing, CMS) and they believe their knowledge base appearance reflects badly on their company and therefore their customers. I am not sure I agree with them but they have this opinion.
Here are some suggestions:
At a minimum, enable the ability to set the website header and footer as the header and footer of the knowledge base. This should be straightforward.
Secondly, provide more control formatting the header where the search box is.
Below these two things, then formatting of the body of the knoledge base is upside, but at least the KB looks like it fits into the rest of the website.
I have many other points of feedback abd would be happy to speak with you about the solution but wanted to remain focused with this reply. Feel free to reach out if you would like to speak about these suggestions and other related ideas.
- Dave Orecchio, Bristol Strategy, Inc. - Hubspot Partner.
Ref. Custom layouts for index pages and articles, just the ability to choose home page (level 1) styling also on the sub category pages (level 2), would be very helpful. We have Tiles on the home page, and would like to have Content Rich
I just wanted to chime in here regarding the Knowledge Base feature which I just signed up for (Service Hub Pro). While I love a majority of the experience and basic templates included in the KB feature, I'm SHOCKED there isn't even a tad more developer control. If not only to be able to add in CSS or scripts to the <head>.
Frankly, I'm not trying to do anything super tricky. I simply want to be able to increase the font sizes in the sidebar, article, etc.
What was the UX rationale in not allowing that user input where the fonts in the KB are currently editable?
At the end of the day, all I really would need is the ability to add in my own CSS to the head for these minor cosmetic changes.
I saw some chatter on this thread so I wanted to hop in. I've been in contact with our Product teams, and at this time we have nothing new to report. Our Product team is well aware of these requests and is balancing them with existing priorities and feature developments. We'll keep monitoring this thread for feedback and additional input, so please continue to leave us your feedback. It greatly helps us deliver the features you want to be built.
Thank you for the update Joe. I can report that our clients are missing the "see more" link and missing out on articles because of the cumbersome navigation. It's a massive effort to write all this content only to have it passed over. I know this is a big problem for others as well. It's not a workable KB without the ease of use of a navigation tree menu... we don't want our customers to have to find the needle in the haystack... should be quickly and easily accessible. Please escalate!
It would be nice if we could change the background color of the knowledge base to match the brands visual profile better. For now it's just possible to change the color and pattern on the header, not the main container.
We would like to have the ability to add internal 'tags' or fields to KB articles so that we can then label and search for related articles for updating purposes. E.g. to be able to tag all articles that contain hyperlinks that are used in our code, or all articles that have images of page x of our product so we can easily find them and replace screenshots if that page is updated with new features. At the moment we have to manually search the body of text to find this sort of information which is hugely time consuming.