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:
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.
Chiming in here as this is a huge deal-breaker for us at the moment. We already host our website on HubSpot, manage all our CRM, Marketing and Sales and I'm really wanting to implement the full Service Hub too (only using tickets at the moment) but the lack of customisation is a massive barrier. 😞
Even something as simple as the ability to load an external style sheet would be a big improvement. That way we can override the existing styles as needed.
Hello, new customer to HubSpot and I'm involved in deciding whether to use your knowledge base or stick with Word press.
I've just started to take a look around to see what I could achieve using the templates that you provide, I already knew that they were very restrictive however what I didnt realise was that you can only really have 1 landing page (the home page).
Our software is extensive, so if I choose a topic on the home page (created in HubSpot), I will be presented with a navigation bar on the left hand side of my page where I will see sub categories that I have created associated with the topic I chose on the Home Page. But I won't see or have the option to build a similar layout to what I have on the home page. Instead whilst it can look organised, its ultimately a list of articles and I dont think thats the best user experience.
If I choose - https://help.hubspot.com/ Im taken to a home page, where I can choose a topic from a typical layout that I would expect. If I select 'knowledge base' from options available - Im taken to a new page, which is presented in a very similar style to the home page.
This is a great example of what we need as a business for our own knowledge base, but doesnt yet seem possible within HubSpot.
Based on that, I am leaning towards word press which is a little bit frustrating as we will be using HubSpot extensively for services, all our customer tickets etc, so it would make so much more sense to have a knowledge base in HubSpot.
Absolutely necessary. We can't match our customers corporate designs and they are paying hundrets of euros for the service hub. Sorry, but this is not acceptable...and it should be no big deal for you to make the CSS accessible.
Thanks for your attention to this issue, @Snaedis. You mentioned we should add our voice to this thread if KB customization is important to us, so I'm doing just that. We're hoping to customize fonts (with the ability to use a Google Font being the main request) and adjust the layout on the KB index page. It would be really excellent if we could edit the KB index page to add our own modules to the page alongside the existing grid layout currently used for KB article categories.
I'd be happy to show examples or use cases when the product team is ready to move this into planning and production.
Thanks for bringing all these suggestions together in one place Snaedis. It's good to see a summary of some issues currently under discussion.
I'm currently trying to work out how to set up a knowledgebase in Hubspot that is currently set up in Madcap Flare. There appear to be several key limitations in Hubspot that makes this tricky, but I would be interested to hear from others how they would deal with these challenges, as I'm new to Hubspot.
We are keen to move our knowledgebase into Hubspot because of the integration features it provides, but working around these issues is making it a bigger job than we had hoped.
1. Drop-down accordions not available. This is a key feature of Flare and allows embedded paragraphs, tables and images to be hidden under a heading, but displayed by clicking on that heading. It's a great way of layering information in one article so that the user can see what's there and read selected information without having to jump to new articles. The nearest I can get to reproducing this behavior is to set up a mini-TOC at the start of a long article and link each heading in the TOC to an anchor further down the article. But more on anchors later...
2. Single categorization of articles. As far as I can see, any article can appear once only in the overall architecture of the knowledgebase. This is a problem for me as the current Flare knowledgebase has two or more entry points in the TOC for many articles. For example, Jobs>Job settings>Job templates, Templates>Job templates, Settings>Job settings>Job templates. So it looks like I have to decide which is the most useful access path for the article on Job templates and categorize it accordingly.
3. Two levels: Category and sub-category. Flare allows as many levels as required to be defined in the overall table of contents for the knowledgebase. This is a powerful feature as it allows individual articles to be located in the most suitable place in the overall information architecture, regardless of how many levels are required. Continuing with the previous example, there is currently an article called "Creating a job template". This article appears at the end of the path: Jobs>Job settings>Job templates>Creating a job template, at level 4 in the hierarchy. Because I can only store articles down to three levels, this means that all the articles about working with Job templates (creating, editing, deleting, copying etc.) need to be stored in a single article in Hubspot. This is OK, but I need to make use of my mini-TOC to allow users to jump straight to the relevant section. In some ways it's probably better to limit the number of levels in the hierarchy, but it's going to require some rethinking about how the articles are organized and linked to get it to work in Hubspot.
4. Links to anchors only within the same article. I can't find any way to set up a link from one article to another that goes to an anchor in the target article, rather than the article itself. This means that if I want to set up a link from one article to (say) the "Deleting a job template" section of the Job templates article, I can't do that. The nearest I can get is to jump to the article itself and then rely on the user spotting the "deleting" option in the mini-TOC. This problem could be resolved if it was possible to edit the HTML directly (as mentioned in the main post) and add a suitable anchor reference manually to the link.
Perhaps you can give me some idea if any of these issues are likely to be addressed in the near future? All of them apart from the last one have some sort of workaround, but that could be addressed if HTML editing is provided.
Ditto to all of the above. Asking for this for 2 years and not having anything change is unacceptable. We don't want to make our Knowledge base public until it's customizable. Until then, we may have to host somewhere else. 😞
How do we find out if an idea is progressing - the idea of this community is great but I havent seen any responses to my post and it seems like a critical idea right now looking at all these other posts.
This would be really great. We have no data on our current FAQS and we aren't able to use the knowledgebase because it looks vastly different than our interface. I'm loosing so much data!
