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A portal is the account-wide container — one slug, one set of branding, one place its categories and articles live. Most accounts create exactly one and never touch this page again.

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What a portal holds

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string
An internal label. Shows in the dashboard so you can tell portals apart — not necessarily to readers.
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string, unique across all of Tied
Becomes part of the public URL. The uniqueness check isn’t scoped to your account — it’s install-wide, so another tenant may already hold an obvious choice like help or support. Pick it deliberately: changing it later breaks any link you’ve already shared or indexed.
What a reader actually sees. The logo is a real file upload, not a URL you paste in — everything else here is text.
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string, optional
Serve the portal at your own hostname instead of Tied’s. The field itself is simple — the DNS side of setting it up is covered in Portal settings.

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Config is deliberately narrow

Locale and widget settings live in a separate config object on the portal, and it only accepts three keys: default_locale, allowed_locales, and website_token. Anything else is rejected.
This is a validation, not an oversight. Saving a portal fails outright if config contains an unrecognized key. If you’re scripting portal setup through the API, stick to those three.

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Attaching a web widget

A portal can optionally belong to one web chat widget inbox. That link is what puts Help Center search inside the widget, so a visitor can find an answer before typing a message to a human or the AI agent. Only a Web Widget–type inbox is eligible. Pointing it at any other channel type is silently ignored rather than an error — nothing happens, and the portal stays unattached.

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Running more than one

Each portal is fully independent: its own categories, its own articles, its own slug, its own domain if you set one. Nothing is shared between portals except the account they live in. Run more than one only to serve genuinely separate brands or audiences that shouldn’t share a knowledge base — a second product line, a white-labeled offering, a partner-facing site. If the goal is just organizing content for one audience, use categories instead. A second portal is not a bigger folder.

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Archiving

A portal has its own archived flag, separate from any individual article’s status. Archiving one takes the slug URL down — Tied’s own /hc/<slug> address stops serving, and if it was attached to a web widget, search inside that widget stops returning anything from it. The categories and articles underneath aren’t deleted, just no longer served there.
A custom domain keeps serving an archived portal. The custom-domain lookup runs before the archived check and doesn’t filter on it, so if the portal has a custom domain attached, that domain stays fully live after you archive — same content, same public access — even though the slug URL is down.

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Next

Categories and structure

Nesting, ordering and related categories.

Writing and publishing articles

The editor, draft state, authorship and SEO.

Portal settings and custom domain

The DNS side of a custom domain, search, and visibility.

Web chat

The widget a portal can attach to.