Create and manage topics in a help center

A topic lets you group request forms, knowledge base articles, and external resources from across portals. You can create topics in your help center to help your customers find the relevant resources or request forms they need faster and improve self-service.

For example, you could create a topic called ‘New hire basics’ to bring together all help resources that a new hire would need in one place. To this topic, you could add request forms to get access to software tools and services from your IT team’s portal, knowledge base articles that cover company policies from your HR and legal teams' portals, forms to raise requests with the security team, links to important company policies and so on. This would make it easy for a new hire who comes to your help center to get all the information and help they need under one topic, without having to keep track of which team’s portal to go to.

You can create up to 15 topics in your help center. Each topic will have a unique URL and a separate page.

You need to be a Jira admin to create and manage topics in your help center.

Create a topic

1. Go to Settings () > Products > Jira Service Management > Configuration.

2. In the Help center section, select View all help centers.

3. Select the help center of your choice.

4. Once in the help center, select Customize from the top navigation, and from the dropdown, select Manage topics and portals.

5. Once you’re in the Manage topics and portals page, select Create topic.

6. Give your topic a name and add a description.

7. From the panel on the right, select a portal. You can search for and add help resources from this portal to the topic. You’ll only be able to view and add help resources from portals of service projects that are linked to this help center.

   1. Select the plus icon () next to the request forms, links, and articles you want to add to the topic. You can add up to 50 request forms, external resources, and/or knowledge base articles to one topic.

   2. Once added, you can also drag and drop to reorder them.

8. Once you’ve finished building the topic, select Done to temporarily save the topic. Remember that this doesn’t make the topic visible on your help center yet.

   • You can also discard the changes you made to the topic by selecting Cancel.

9. Select Publish layout in the Manage topics and portals page to make the topic you created visible on the help center.

   • You can revert to the last published version of the home page layout by selecting Cancel. Any topics you may have created and not published yet will be lost.

Once you publish the layout, your topics will appear at the top of the home page. Topics, on their own, do not have permission settings as yet. So when naming a topic and writing a description, do keep in mind that even customers who aren’t logged in to your help center will be able to view them. However, in each topic, your customers will only be able to see help resources (request form or article) that they have the permission to view. Read more about managing customer permissions.

You can reorder topics in the Manage topics and portals page using drag and drop.

If you aren’t ready to make a topic go live on your help center, you can still create the topic and hide it till you are ready to publish it. Read how to manage visibility of topics in your help center.

Edit topics

1. Go to Settings () > Products > Jira Service Management > Configuration.

2. In the Help center section, select View all help centers.

3. Select the help center of your choice.

4. Once in the help center, select Customize from the top navigation, and from the dropdown, select Manage topics and portals.

5. Once you’re in the Manage topics and portals page, hover over the topic you want to edit and select the Edit icon ( ).

6. Make the necessary edits and select Done to temporarily save these changes. Remember that this doesn’t make the changes you made to the topic visible on your help center yet.

   • You can also discard the changes you made to the topic by selecting Cancel.

7. Select Publish layout in the Manage topics and portals page to make changes you made to the topic visible on the help center.

   • You can revert to the last published version of the home page layout by selecting Cancel. Any unpublished changes you may have made will be lost.

Remove topics

1. Go to Settings () > Products > Jira Service Management > Configuration.

2. In the Help center section, select View all help centers.

3. Select the help center of your choice.

4. Once in the help center, select Customize from the top navigation, and from the dropdown, select Manage topics and portals.

5. Once you’re in the Manage topics and portals page, hover over the topic you want to remove and select the Remove icon ( x ). Remember that this doesn’t remove this topic from the home page yet.

   • To undo this action, you can select Undo remove in the success message that appears immediately after removing a topic.

6. Select Publish layout in the Manage topics and portals page to remove the topic from your help center’s home page.

   • You can revert to the last published version of the home page layout by selecting Cancel. Any unpublished changes you may have made will be lost.

Once you remove a topic and publish the layout, the topic will be lost forever and cannot be recovered. The request forms, external resources, and knowledge base articles that were added to the topic will continue to be available in the respective service projects and their portals.