Help Center API limitations with content blocks

The Help Center API has certain limitations if content blocks have been enabled for one or more articles. This article describes these limitations.

Content blocks let article authors insert the same content in multiple articles. See Reusing content with content blocks in Zendesk help. Certain articles in the help center may have content blocks enabled and others may not.

The Help Center API behaves normally with articles that don't have content blocks enabled.

Showing or listing articles

You can use the Show Article and List Articles endpoints to get articles that have content blocks enabled. In the response, however, the content of any content block is converted to normal inline text. Example:

"body": "<p>This article has content blocks enabled.</p>\n<p>This is a content block.</p>\n<p>This is the rest of the article.</p>"

Updating an article or translation

The body property of the Update Article and Update Translation endpoints do not support content blocks.

If you make a preliminary GET request to get the body of an article with content blocks to use in the update request, the content of any content block in the article is converted to normal text in the GET response.

Updating any other property does not affect any content blocks in the article.

Archiving an article

You can use the Archive Article endpoint to archive articles containing content blocks.

Using article ids in API requests

To identify an article for GET, PUT, or DELETE requests, use the article id returned by the List Articles endpoint. Don't use the article id displayed in the article's URL in the Guide admin interface.

When content blocks are enabled for an article, the article's URL in the Guide admin interface looks as follows:

https://z3ndocs-zsuite-enterprise.zendesk.com/knowledge/editor/01FVDPK3FEJTBPQE3Q21FQE99M/en-us?brand_id=1260800167610

You can't use 01FVDPK3FEJTBPQE3Q21FQE99M as a parameter in the Help Center API. It's a special id for the admin interface.

Enabling content blocks

The API doesn't support enabling content blocks on new or existing articles. Content blocks must be enabled in Guide. See Enabling content blocks in Zendesk help.