Sneak Peek: HelpGizmo V4

While you’ve been busy working on your knowledge bases, handbooks, and manuals, Sheriff Pete has been busy working on a major upgrade to the HelpGizmo application. which we lovingly call Version 4. The new version of our knowledge base software has been available in beta for almost a week, and the verdict is in: Version 4 is a hit!

The first thing you’ll notice is the enhanced design and user interface. For those fans of Purplosion, not to fear: we did keep the trademark purple in the theme. However, thanks to help of a colleague and the fine folks at Flat UI, we now have a brand new color palette and we couldn’t be more pleased. Our website has been using the theme for the past month or so, but, once V4 hits the stands, you’ll be greeted by our familiar login page done up in the new design:

 

However, the new version is much more than just a facelift. We made some major organizational changes to the application and added some new features that our testers have loved. Here’s our top three favorite new features that are available now in V4:

1. New Knowledge Base Editor

Not to worry! The Table of Contents you know and love is still alive and well in your production knowledge bases. However, for those of you with many categories and articles, you know how unruly it became when trying to find and organize your documentation in the editor.

Meet the new knowledge base editor, brainchild of Sheriff Pete:

 

With the new Knowledge Base, you can view the main sections of your knowledge base: the home page, the contact form, and, of course, your articles. When you are viewing your articles, you will get a list of all your top-level categories, which you can easily reorder using the drag and drop reorder icon.

When you choose a category, a new list appears with all the articles and sub-categories contained within that category.  Articles and sub-categories are easily reordered using the same drag and drop reorder icon, and you can even drag and drop articles into new categories on the left.

Click on the wrench icon or the title of any category or article to edit, and click on the eye icon to view it live on your site.

2. Article Editor Upgrades

The upgrades to our article editor are thanks to feedback from one of our amazing users (a big shoutout to Mel!). We moved the article content to the left and all other features and options to the right-side column. Since the content and title are the most frequently updated parts of knowledge base articles, we made it the first thing you see when you go to edit.

To keep things quick and easy to update, we moved the Save and Cancel buttons to the top-right. We also added a new Preview button that will allow you to see your changes on the site without having to save or even Publish your article. Our goal was to make creating and maintaing your content as quick and painless as possible.

3. View Knowledge Base Button

Sometimes it’s the little things that bring about the most happiness. One of the most common requests we’ve had is for a quick and easy way to view your live knowledge base, manual, or handbook. Well, we are please to introduce the View Knowledge Base button, which is available from any application page inside your knowledge base:

More Features: Coming Soon!

We hope you are as excited as we are for the upcoming enhancements to HelpGizmo, but boy do we have a lot more in store for you. I just happened to see Sheriff Pete working on a new knowledge base theme, so if you like the upgrades to our application, you’re going to love the new knowledge base theme.

We’d love to hear what you think as well!