The importance of quality documentation cannot be overstated; equally important is a knowledge base that's intuitive to use. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the most important features of our knowledge base.
Home page/header
Let's start with some of the features of the Home page and header.
Create a Case
For convenience, the ability to create a case is available directly from the knowledge base. To do so, however, you'll need to create an account and be signed in. Once you are, click the Create a Case button at the top right, in the header, or at the bottom of the page, in the footer.
These two buttons are available on every page, ensuring you can easily submit a ticket.
Useful links
Above the documentation categories are several useful links:
- HUG links to the Higher Logic User Group (HUG), a vibrant community resource you and your peers can use to share their insights and experiences.
- Education links to the Higher Logic Academy, which provides access to monthly webinars, regional in-person events, and our E-Learning portal.
- Known Issues links to the Known Issues landing page, where you can branch off to view product-specific bugs and other issues that may be experienced by multiple customers. By highlighting these known issues, our goal is to reassure you that we're aware of them and have plans to resolve them and/or provide workarounds to prevent disruption to your day-to-day workflow.
- What's New provides access to product-specific articles about upcoming features in Higher Logic Thrive Community (Thrive Community) and our Higher Logic Thrive Marketing (Thrive Marketing) products.
- Support Resources takes you to the Support Resources landing page, which serves as a launching off point several Support resources.
Knowledge base structure
We've organized our knowledge base into a product-based approach to make manually navigating to articles faster and more logical. The foundation of our content is based on primary categories (shown below), which provide a more intuitive launch pad to access topic-specific sections, sub-sections, and articles.
This layout makes it easier for you to find information about our:
- Standard product offerings
- Add-on products and secondary offerings
- Product-based integrations
After accessing a category, its associated sections (Site Management and Community Management) are presented as expandable dropdowns. In the example below, we've expanded the Site Management section, which includes several articles and two sub-sections. This layout makes it easy to quickly parse areas of interest and their associated articles.
NOTE: Sub-sections don't expand on the page like sections; they open a new page to display the articles.
Home page widgets
Below the categories are two widgets we think you'll find useful:
- Promoted Articles - This is where we'll highlight the articles we think deserve special attention. Keep an eye on this list from time to time, as we'll be updating it with new, important articles.
- Recently Viewed - Like a built-in favorites list, this dynamic widget tracks the last handful of articles that you have viewed, making it easy to jump back to them at any time.
Search
You can search for articles from every knowledge base page, except for the Home page and Search results page.
NOTE: As indicated on the Home page banner, click into a category and then search. This ensures that your search returns articles that are exclusive to the category that you're in.
Use the search field to pinpoint your article search to a topic of interest, such as discussions or templates. When you type your search word or phrase and press Enter, you're taken to the Search results page with a list of matching articles and a page navigation below the list. Note:
- The results page displays the search term and number of results.
- The breadcrumbs indicate the path to the article, and each point in the path is a link to quickly access.
TIP: See How to Search Our Knowledge Base to learn about key features and search tips to make searching our knowledge base as easy and efficient as possible.
Article pages
Our article pages include several features to enhance your "information gathering" experience.
- A new Global Navigation menu appears at the article level. It remains as long as you're viewing a knowledge base article, and automatically refreshes to reflect your location as you navigate (your current article is highlighted orange). You can expand and collapse categories and sections to quickly access any article in the knowledge base. This structure replaces the old top-down navigation structure that required too much time and effort to drill-down to the content being sought.
- Most articles now include an article-specific table of contents menu, which lists their main topics. Not only can they be clicked to quickly jump to areas of interest, they’re highlighted with an orange bar as you scroll, noting your location on the page.
- The breadcrumbs remain above an article so that you can see "where you are" and easily backtrack if necessary.
Legends in Thrive Community articles
Articles in the Higher Logic Thrive Community Category include legends for Admin-based articles.
The legends display at the top of the knowledge base articles, so you can immediately determine whether the content is for you!
Why we have legends
In our Thrive Community product there are:
- Several available packages, each of which includes its own set of modules, features, and tools.
- Several Admin levels, each of which includes different (access and management) permissions within the community.
We want to be sure that it's easy for you to connect with the info that's relevant to the features and functionality of your product and Admin level.
What the legends mean
Product packages legends
The Availability legend indicates which product packages the KB article pertains to. Availability translates to the feature/article topic being available with the product packages, either out-of-the-box or as an add-on to it.
Roles-based legends
This Admin Role legend indicates which Admin roles can perform the actions that are described in the article.
