Help Center

How to set up a Help Center?

You can easily create a self-service portal for your customers to access articles and information. In this guide, we take you through the steps to set up a Help Center, including creating a portal and adding articles. You can set up your Help Center in three parts, as explained below. I. Creating a portal Step 1. Click the Help Center icon from your sidebar, and click the "New Portal" button. Step 2. You will see a basic settings page. Start filling in the fields. These fields are explained below: 1. Logo Upload your organization's logo. 2. Name Name your portal to refer to it internally. 3. Slug This will be auto-generated. 4. Custom Domain (optional) You can add the domain you want to serve your portal on a custom domain. For example, if your website is yourdomain.com and you want your portal accessible at docs.yourdomain.com, type that in this field. Click "Create portal basic settings". Your portal is ready. You can start adding categories and articles within these categories. II. Creating categories Categories exist to structure your portal and organize your articles. Follow these steps: Step 1. Click the + sign alongside the Category section on the secondary sidebar to create a new category. Step 2. A modal will open up. Fill up the fields. These fields are described below. 1. Name Name your category. This name will be used on the public portal. 2. Slug This will be auto-generated. 3. Description (optional) Describe your category. Click the "Create category" button. III. Creating articles Finally, start writing your articles. Follow the steps below. Step 1. You can find the "New Article" button on almost every page. Click it. Step 2. Use the text editor to write your article. Use the sidebar to select your article's category and author and update the meta content. Here is an example: You can use the "Preview" button to see how your article turns out. Once ready, click "Publish". Your live article will look like this:

How to get an SSL certificate for your Help Center's custom domain?

With SSL, your customers can access your Help Center portal securely and without any risk of data breaches. We provide SSL certificates through the Chatwoot domain to ensure the security of your help documentation. Let's create a product documentation portal for yourdomain.com. We will use this for the custom-domain docs.yourdomain.com. Follow the steps below. Step 1. Open your Portal settings. - If creating a new portal, click the "New Portal" button. - If you have an existing portal, click "Settings" from your Help Center's secondary sidebar. Step 2. Find the "Custom Domain" field and fill it up. Let us assume you are using docs.yourdomain.com. Step 3. Click the "Create" or "Update" button as seen to save your settings. Step 4. Next, you need to point your custom domain to chatwoot.help. To do this, open your name server, go to its DNS settings, and add a new CNAME record. Add docs as a CNAME record for the above example and point it to chatwoot.help. - I am using the Cloudflare name server You can find the setting under the "DNS" tab. - I am using the AWS name server You can find the setting under the "Route53" service. - If you have a different server, these settings will be similar. Just find the DNS settings and add a CNAME record. Or search for How to add CNAME record with your nameserver?. This will ensure that your CNAME record points to the Chatwoot server. We now have your portal information and the SSL certificate for your custom domain. In this case, docs.example.com. Getting an SSL certificate​ Chatwoot provides SSL certificates for all cloud customers who set up a custom domain for their Help Center portal. Contact our support to get your SSL certificate and provide them with your custom domain record. Alternatively, email us the subject line "Issue SSL certification for {Portal Slug}". NOTE: We require 1-2 working days to set this up.​ docs.yourdomain.com is live with a secure connection, and your portal data is visible. How does this work?​ When a customer points their custom domain to chatwoot.help through CNAME, DNS points it to Chatwoot's site. However, it's not yet valid. When a customer requests to serve the docs.yourdomain.com endpoint with the portal's data, Chatwoot validates the routing from docs.yourdomain.com to chatwoot.help by adding a record in their Heroku dashboard. This validates the Heroku DNS routing and the custom domain. To set this up, you can go to the Heroku dashboard, navigate to Chatwoot, and go to Settings -> Domains to add a new domain to serve, such as docs.yourdomain.com. Customers need to point their custom domain to chatwoot.help through CNAME, and then request Chatwoot support to issue an SSL certification for their portal custom domain record. Once done, the SSL certificate is verified through Heroku DNS routing and custom domain validation. To certify the record for docs.yourdomain.com, customers can go to their Cloudflare dashboard and add a record with HTTP validation and certificate type 'Provided by Cloudflare'. After waiting for the SSL certificate to become active, customers can check the ACM status for docs.yourdomain.com on Heroku, which should show Ok when completed. Cloudflare's custom hostname functionality provides the certificate to the custom domain that we add. 1. docs.yourdomain.com resolves by the customer's name server and redirects to chatwoot.help. 2. chatwoot.help name server certifies docs.yourdomain.com. 3. Chatwoot's Heroku domain's settings validate the certificate and routes to chatwoot.help root dashboard. 4. chatwoot.help checks for the portal record with custom-domain docs.yourdomain.com. 5. Redirects to the portal records for the domain docs.yourdomain.com.