ScreenSteps

What are article aliases?

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Many times customers want to have the same article show up either in two places in the same manual or in two manuals in the same site. Integrations with external services such as Zendesk create complications with this as they don't allow the same article to appear in two different locations. Each article can only appear once in their services. ScreenSteps uses the concept of aliases to solve this problem.

Article aliases

When you add a reference of an article to a chapter in ScreenSteps two separate articles are created. Even though there are two different articles they are linked together. Changes to one article will be reflected in both articles.

This means you can have the same article appear as many times as you like in the same manual as well as in multiple manuals. It also means you can have the same content live in multiple articles in external services like Zendesk.

FAQs

Does it matter which article I edit if an article has aliases?

No. Updating the content in one of the articles will update the content in the aliases.

What happens if I delete an article that has an alias?

Only the article you delete will be deleted. The aliases will remain intact.

There is not a way to break the link between alias articles in a particular chapter. You can, however, duplicate the aliased article in the chapter and then remove the alias. The duplicate copy will be a standalone version of the article.

If you are using Zendesk and the alias you want to delete is connected to an article in Zendesk then you can connect the duplicate article to the existing Zendesk article. This way the article in Zendesk will be updated whenever you update the duplicate version of the article.

Using aliases can cause less than 10 results to be displayed in search results. See here for an explanation:

Why I am seeing fewer than 10 results on a page when searching?

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