Write and Publish Your First Article

Before you start

You need the Create knowledge-base articles permission to write, and Publish knowledge-base articles to publish. If your role has the Manage knowledge base template, you have both. If you cannot see the New Article button, see Knowledge Base permissions.

This walkthrough takes about five minutes and ends with a live article you can verify from both sides.

Step 1 — Open the authoring surface

1. Click Knowledge Base in the left navigation. This opens the Library, your team's reading room.
2. Click Manage articles at the top right.

You are now on the authoring surface. If your organization has never written an article, you will see No articles yet and a Write your first article button — you can start from there instead of step 2.

Step 2 — Create the draft

Click New Article.

DevStride creates the draft immediately and opens it in the full-page editor. It is called Untitled article until you name it.

Step 3 — Write it

Title — click the title field at the top and replace Untitled article. Keep it specific and phrased the way a reader would search for it. "Reset a forgotten password" beats "Password policy" if resetting is what people actually come looking for.

Body — click into the editor below and write. It is the same rich-text editor used for item descriptions, so the formatting, keyboard shortcuts, and image pasting all behave the way you are used to. You can paste or drag images straight in.

Watch the save indicator beside the title. It tells you exactly where you stand:

Saving is automatic and debounced — it fires shortly after you stop typing, not on every keystroke.

Step 4 — File it into a category

The right-hand rail is divided into four panels — Status & lifecycle, Audience, Organization, and (once published) URL. You will use all four before you are done.

Open Organization and set Category to where the article belongs.

If you have not built any categories yet, leave it alone — the article becomes Uncategorized, which is a perfectly valid home. You can file it later, and you can build your category tree once you have a sense of what you are actually writing. See Organizing with categories.

Step 5 — Choose who it is for

In the Audience panel of the rail, set Visibility:

• Portal (customers) — customers may read it, once it is published.
• Internal (members only) — only your team, ever. You will see the hint "Internal articles never appear on your customer portal."

New articles default to Portal (customers), so if this article is internal, change it now rather than after publishing.

If you want the article restricted to particular customer companies rather than all of them, click Edit next to Companies and choose them. Leave it as All companies if everyone should see it.

Step 6 — Publish

Click Publish in the Status & lifecycle panel.

The first time you publish an article, DevStride asks you to confirm and shows the URL it is about to create:

Publish article This article will be published with the URL slug "reset-a-forgotten-password". If that slug is already taken, a numbered variant (e.g. "reset-a-forgotten-password-2") is used instead.

Click Publish to confirm.

Three things happen:

1. The state chip changes to published and a Published {date} line appears.
2. The article gets a permanent URL slug — shown in a new URL panel in the rail.
3. It becomes readable immediately. There is no build, cache, or republish step.

Step 7 — Confirm your readers can see it

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that catches mistakes.

Check the team side. Click ← Manage articles, then ← Browse articles to reach the Library. Your article should be listed. If you marked it internal, it carries an Internal badge here — that badge is your confirmation that customers are not seeing it.

Check the customer side. Back in the editor, look under the slug in the URL panel. If you see:

Live on your customer portal

then the article genuinely is reachable by customers — it is published, marked for the portal, and no category is hiding it. If that line is absent on an article you meant to publish externally, something is blocking it. Work through Who can see an article to find which of the three gates is closed.

What to do next

Keep writing. Repeat steps 2–6. Once you have a handful of articles, patterns emerge and you will know what your categories should be.

Then organize. Build the category tree around the articles you actually wrote, not the ones you imagined writing. See Organizing with categories.

Retiring something later. Use Unpublish to pull an article back to draft while keeping its URL reserved, or Archive to retire it for good. Neither deletes anything.

Quick reference