Create and Manage Docs Collections and Categories

This article will help you understand the basic organizational structure within Docs. You'll also learn how to manage collections and categories.

What Are Collections and Categories?

Collections

If your site is a bookcase, Collections would be the shelves, and Categories would be the books. Each collection should cover a completely different topic, product, or department. Depending on how you structure your documentation, you might need one collection or a couple of collections. In our example below, we use 3 collections: For Customers, Wholesale and For the Team.

Because information for customers and wholesale will be completely different, it makes sense for content to be separated in to different shelves, or collections. For the Team is a private collection, so it's not visible on the public website.

You'll see collections appear on the top navigation bar of your public Docs website. Everybody loves a neat, organized bookcase, so don't get too wild with multiple collections.

Categories

Categories are books on your shelves. Each collection can have multiple categories. Articles are like the chapters within each book. Articles can belong to multiple categories, so your customers can find what they need in multiple locations.

Here's one point we want to drive home: articles cannot belong to more than one collection. If you find yourself needing the same article in two collections, you might want to turn those collections in to categories instead.

Create and Manage Collections

We recommend having some structure set up before you start relentlessly pecking away at your keyboard to write articles. Decide what you want to name your collections, and create them before you start creating categories and articles. 

To get started, head to Manage > Docs from the top navigation menu and choose your Docs site, then click Collections in the left navigation menu. Click New Collection to open the modal window. 

1

Name your collection — this is the name that will appear to your visitors on the site and in your Docs administration menus. Set the visibility to Public or Private. (See Private Collections and Articles for Internal Users for more information on the differences there.) Optionally, enter a description that will appear on your collection listing page on your site. 

2

Collections appear on your site in the same order you see them in this list. You can reorder them here by clicking on the bar icon and dragging them in place.

3

Click on a collection to customize the name, visibility, and category sorting order.

If you don't have any categories just yet, create one (or a few) before moving on. Reorder categories by dragging them up or down on the page. Don't forget to save your changes.

If you delete a collection, any existing articles or categories that belong to that collection will also be deleted.

Create Categories

You can create categories from a few different locations in Docs:

• Choose Docs from the top navigation menu, then select a collection. click the + menu and choose Create Category.
  
• At Manage > Docs > [Your Docs Site] > Collections, click into a collection and you'll see the option to create a New Category.
• In the Docs editor, expand the right hand navigation menu and find New Category there as well.
  

Edit or Delete Categories

Click on Docs in the top navigation menu, choose your collection, then click into the category you want to edit. Click the category name at the top of the list of articles. 

When you delete a category it only deletes that category. The articles that were in the deleted category will become Uncategorized in the left navigation menu. There is no option to restore a deleted category.