Protected Articles

Note: This feature is available only in the Enterprise Editions of PHPKB software.

Protected articles feature allows you to make some the public articles of your knowledge base private, so that only logged in users can view them. This gives you the control who can see the contents of your public knowledge base. There are a load of reasons you might want to protect your articles from public view, whether you’re using your articles internally to train staff, or you wish to share some information with your resellers.

	01 PUBLIC ARTICLES Public articles don't require any login and are accessible to all users.
	02 PROTECTED ARTICLES These articles are posted under public categories and are accessible only to the logged in users.
	03 PRIVATE ARTICLES Private articles are accessible to logged in users having access to user-groups.

The protected articles differ from private because of the ease they give to admin users in sharing information. The administrators can share the information that is private but common for all just by turning on the protected attribute of an article. However, user specific private information can be shared with the help of user-groups in the form of private articles.

Protected articles could be useful for several reasons:

• Internal communications: You could use protected articles to share information that's only relevant to staff members, like internal policies or processes.
• Confidential information: If some of your knowledge base contains sensitive information, you can use protected articles to ensure only authorized individuals can view it.
• User-specific content: You might have content that's only relevant to certain users or groups. For example, you could create articles specifically for your sales team, your customer service team, and so on.

How to make articles protected?

Making an article protected in the knowledge base is very easy. Just toggle the protected button ON in the admin area and PHPKB software will handle the rest.

Accessing a Protected Article?

To access a protected article, a user must login to knowledge base. Once a user is logged in, protected articles are visible wherever present in the knowledge base, such as in category tree, recently added articles, featured articles, search results, auto-suggestions etc.

Protected Articles and Search Engines

Search engines are unlikely to crawl them because this only happens if a search engine can find them. To index the protected article, the search engine needs the login credentials which is not possible.