Sections

Categories are the spine of your Knowledge Base — every article lives in exactly one. Sections are something different. A section is a secondary grouping that pulls articles from anywhere in your KB, based on rules you set or a manual list, and renders them as their own block on the public site.

You’d use a section for things like:

• Most popular — the five articles with the most views.
• For developers — articles tagged developer regardless of which category they’re in.
• What’s new — articles published in the last 30 days.
• Returns and refunds — a curated list of articles spanning Billing and Returns categories.
• Sales reps — articles tagged for the sales team, drawn from across the KB.

A single article can appear in many sections. Sections never replace a category; an article still lives in its primary category. Sections are about surfacing it from a different angle.

How sections fill themselves

Every section is either rule-driven or manual:

• Rule-based auto-fill — Section pulls articles matching filters you set: categories, subcategories, tags, sort order, limit. Updates automatically as articles match. — When the membership should evolve as you add content — “Articles tagged troubleshooting”, “Newest 10 articles”, “Everything in Billing or Returns”.
• Manual list — You pick specific articles by ID. Updates only when you edit the section. — When the curation matters more than the rule — “Five articles I want featured on the home page”.

Rule-based sections support these filters:

• Category IDs — limit to articles in specific categories.
• Subcategory IDs — limit to articles in specific subcategories.
• Tag IDs — limit to articles tagged with at least one of the chosen tags.
• Sort mode — newest, oldest, most-viewed, alphabetical.
• Limit — cap on how many articles render in the section.

Combine them: “Tagged troubleshooting AND in the Billing category, sorted by most-viewed, limit 5.”

Where sections appear

A section can be rendered on the public help center via the Section Grid, Section List, or Section Bar blocks in the layout builder. Each block points at a specific section. You can also have a section that exists in your config but isn’t rendered anywhere — useful as a draft.

Sections don’t have their own URLs by default. Articles still link to their category. If you want sections to be navigable as standalone pages, that’s a layout-builder choice — add a Section page to your navigation.

Overview articles

A section can have an overview article — an article shown above the list as introduction or context. Useful when a section is a curated topic (“Returns and refunds”) that benefits from a paragraph of framing before the article list.

Sections vs. tags vs. roles

These three are easy to confuse:

• Tags are labels on articles. They’re cross-cutting and customers can filter by them.
• Sections are groupings of articles. Customers see them as headed blocks on the help center.
• Roles are visibility tags. They control which articles each user sees when browsing.

A tag is a property of an article. A section is a way of presenting a set of articles. A role is who’s allowed to see articles. Use tags to describe articles, sections to display them, and roles to gate them.

Where to go next

• Build a section: Create a section
• Render it on the public site: Customize the public portal
• Reference for the available blocks: Portal blocks reference