One thing that has been requested over and over again was the ability to duplicate an entire workspace. Starting today, this is finally possible.

When duplicating workspaces, all categories, subcategories and articles will be duplicated into a new workspace. Most of the settings will be duplicated as well, but not all. You also have to invite your team to the duplicated workspace, as those are not duplicated.

Those things are not duplicated into the new workspace:

• Workspace custom domain
• Workspace team
• Article ratings and feedback
• Article shadow categories
• Related articles

To duplicate a workspace, simply head over to your workspace settings and scroll all the way down. In addition to transferring and deleting a workspace, you now see the option to duplicate the workspace.

Two-factor authentication (2FA)

We also added the possibility to add an additional layer of security to accounts. When set up, a one-time code needs to be entered in addition to regular login credentials. You will need an authenticator app like Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, or Google Authenticator - the choice is yours.

To enable 2FA, simply go to your account settings and find the section "Two-factor authentication".

Custom scripts

Ever since eniston launched in 2020, we never allowed custom scripts / integrations to be added freely, due to security concerns. Over time, we added many pre-defined integrations that could be easily added to workspaces.

We understand that this is slowing down processes for some of our customers, that is why starting today, custom scripts can be added. We are being notified when custom scripts are added or edited and reserve the right to remove scripts that try to harm the integrity of our platform.

Bug fixes

We also fixes a few smaller bugs, mostly under the hood, but also a couple of styling issues were fixed in the backend.

Finally, right? There are now 3 different methods to prevent external access to the frontend of a workspace:

1. Restrict via IP address
2. Restrict with global password
3. Restrict with email and password frontend authentication

1 and 2 were already around for a while. They do what they promise, but are not always the best solution. Restrict with email and password authentication brings a lot more security and control benefits.

One of those benefits targets teams, or any scenario were multiple people with different accounts worked on a workspace that was restricted with a global password. When one of the people left a team, they could still use the password to access the workspace. So a new password would be needed and everyone on the team had to be informed. That... sucked, obviously.

Now, when a team member is removed and frontend authentication is activated, this former team member is not able to access the workspace anymore.

In a future update we plan to integrate more finer control so it will be possible to restrict certain user groups from categories and articles, both in the backend and frontend. We also plan to implement third-party authentication so our systems can connect to external systems and use JSON Web Token Authentication (JWT).

To enable this new authentication method, log in to your account and go to the workspace settings at eniston.io/base/settings#access. As with the existing global password screen and category password screen, the background color can be changed in the "Appearance" settings (Header Background Color).

One of the things we had planned for a while was to rebuild the "Docs" theme. The initial design worked fine for most cases but code-wise, it was bulky and not a joy to maintain. Today, we finally shipped an updated for the "Docs" theme (and also minor refinements for the "Default" theme).

In general, both light and dark mode now feel more modern and snappier. At least that's our impression. :)

Pinned navigation

There is now a new option to "pin" the navigation to the left side of the screen. This can be toggled by admins. By default, the navigation remains close to the content. With the pinned navigation, the appearance reflects many popular documentation examples and sticks to the left side of the browser window.

Toggle categories

We now also added the option for users to toggle categories. By default, the tree view shows all articles within their categories. Users can now optionally collapse categories in the tree view. This is probably a welcome addition for many users. The states are stored in the browsers local storage.

In case you ever wanted articles to appear in multiple / different categories - without duplicating them - we got something for you:

Shadow categories

Show articles in different categories without duplicating them.

How it works

When assigning shadow categories to an article (via the article settings), this article is connected to these categories. In the frontend (where you view articles), your article will appear in those shadow categories, in addition to the main category. To prevent duplicate content, the article detail view is still opened in the main category. Your article exists only once and will be found only once via search.

Releases integration

We also added an integration for "Releases", one of our own products. If you have an existing Releases account, simply copy the workspace identifier (found in the widget settings) and paste it when creating a new integration in eniston.

If you don't have a "Releases" account yet, you can save 40% off when using the code ENISTON during checkout. Show your product updates directly in your help center with Releases.

A small feature many of you have asked for is now available: clickable tags.

When adding keywords / tags to articles, it is now possible to click on them on the frontend to get a list of other articles that share the same keyword.

In a future update we will improve the keyword selection in the backend to make it easier to re-use existing ones.

After releasing our new search, we received a few dozen emails asking for the old search back. In general, this is something we won't consider as we spend a good amount of time building new stuff like that. New things are (mostly) different and maybe need some time to get used to. But we heard you and we agree that a stellar search is crucial for a knowledge base.

We knew how to get the results we expected and were before, but it was not clear to many of you. That is a clear indicator that we didn't do our job – building a new and better search – good enough.

The old search is back, and even a little better than before

We spent the last days implementing the new old search the way we should have done in the first place. But it was a "quick fix" done in a hurry when we initially did it. It is now more maintainable for us, and brings more relevant search results to you and your users.

We apologize for the trouble some of you had and we appreciate the feedback.

Earlier this year we had to move our frontend search from a custom Meilisearch instance to Algolia. You can read more about this here, if you are interested. As stated back then, this was just a temporary solution until we figure out what went wrong with our Meilisearch instance. Turns out, it was too much data. o_O There is an internal limit on how many indexes can exists, but I don't want to go into any technical details.

That temporary solution almost lasted a whole year, oh boy... But today, we finally released our own and custom search.

This is sort of a "v1" if you will. The initial suggestions are the articles with the most views. And yes, despite the fact that there is no more text preview, it remains a full-text search. Keywords and the intro-text (if set) remain also searchable, just as your actual content.

To trigger the search, you can either click on the search field or the search icon (depending on the theme and browser size). You can also type ⌘K or CTRL+K on your keyboard.

We will improve this search over time and also include a statistic for admins to see how many searches ended with no results. This can be helpful to further improve your content.

If you have any feedback, please let us know.

Today, we were experiencing a downtime of our search server. After 2 hours, we were not able to fix the issue and wanted to avoid further downtime. So we moved all search data from our self-hosted Meilisearch instance to Algolia.

This may be just a temporary solution until we figure out what is going on with the search server. We apologize for this downtime. Search should now work again as expected.

Today we added a sitemap.xml to all workspaces. Simply go to your workspace url and append sitemap.xml, e.g. help.example.com/sitemap.xml to see all your categories and articles.

The sitemap is live, meaning as soon as you add a new category or article, the sitemap is automatically updated. To enable a sitemap for your workspace, simply go to your SEO settings and enable access for search engines.

We will soon add some more features so you can control which categories and articles should be excluded and optionally set a priority score. By default, the home page has a priority of 1.0, all other pages 0.5.

Over the last few months we received quit a few support tickets regarding the search functionality. Most of you noted that it was only possible to search for article titles. That was partly true. You were also able to add keywords and an excerpt to articles which were also searchable.

But we get it, nothing beats a full-text search. Today we're happy to announce that we improved the search function and implemented a full-text search. In favor of this, we removed the preview of the excerpt in search results and replaced it with the (relevant part of the) article text.

In case you added an excerpt, this will still be searched, but not visible in the preview.

We also made it possible to search from category pages and articles when using the "Default" theme.

Dark Mode updates

We also made dark mode a little more... dark. Previously, we used very dark blue tones. That has been changed to actual tones of darker gray for both the "Default" and "Documentation" themes.

New integration

We recently also integrated Let's Connect as a new integration which you can add to your frontend. As usual, if you are in need for a specific integration, get in touch.

Minor improvements

You will notice many, sometimes subtle improvements to the backend (admin area) and frontend of your base(s). We corrected spacings, added a "back to category" button when creating articles, improved loading times or overall corrected a bunch of CSS faux-pas.

If your articles contain code examples, we also have good news for you: We now support 15 more languages, such as AppleScript, Ruby, Swift, SQL, YAML and many more. It is now also possible to copy code examples with a single click.

We now also highlight outgoing links with a special icon, so your visitors see directly which links will leave your base.