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/zendesk-guide-pal

Marla Sowards
Marla Sowards
Documentation Engineer

This is part of a series about the AI agent skills I designed, built, and maintained to cover the full lifecycle of end-user help documentation.

zendesk-guide-pal

What it is​

/zendesk-guide-pal performs Zendesk Help Center operations, like managing article metadata, content tags, labels, redirect rules, and themes.

How it works​

A custom Python MCP server is a wrapper around the Zendesk Help Center API, including both content management and theming. The skill then accepts natural language prompts for actions like (among many others):

  • Add or remove labels by name, on one article or many at once
  • See how often each label is used, including labels that no article uses
  • Create, update, or delete an article
  • List all articles, or only the articles in one category or section
  • Find all articles that have a given content tag, with each article's title, URL, section and category
  • List all sections, or only the sections in one category
  • Create a redirect from one article to another, using article IDs instead of full URLs, with a choice of redirect status (such as 301 or 302)
  • Package a local theme folder into a zip that's ready to upload, leaving out hidden files and old zips
  • Perform actions in dev or prod

Why I built it​

Performing actions through the Zendesk UI requires lots of repetitive clicking to get things done. This is especially true for custom themes managed locally. I wanted to save time and clicks so I could work faster, more efficiently, and without mistakes.

Example prompts​

  • Apply an "export_data" label to every article in the "Export data" section of the Data User Guide.
  • Remove callouts with "Coming soon" at the top of all articles with a "sprint_201_release" label.
  • List all articles that have no label, including their title and direct URL, and suggest labels.
  • List all unused labels and delete them with my approval.

For ultimate time savings, I used my Zendesk Guide MCP server in tandem with my Paligo MCP server to perform multi-system actions, like:

  • Publish the updated "Data User Guide" in Paligo to Zendesk and apply the Zendesk label "extract_data" to all new articles created in that guide in Paligo last week.
tip

See my blog post, Build your own MCP server to hand off content management system tasks to an AI agent, for details on how I built the Zendesk Guide MCP server and wired it up with the /zendesk-guide-pal skill.