Articles

An article is a piece of writing for your clients: a weekly briefing, a guide to a training phase, a recipe with photos, an explainer with a video and a table. It has a title, a cover, a category and a body made of blocks, and it reads the same way in the client app, on their phone, as it did while you wrote it. You reach articles from Vault → Articles.

Articles sit next to the content library rather than inside it, on purpose. The library holds files. An article holds an argument: text, media and structure in the order you meant. A file you upload can be placed inside an article; an article cannot be dropped into a folder.

The list

• All, Drafts, Published filter by status. A draft is yours alone; a published article is live for its audience.
• Category offers whatever categories your articles already use. It is free text, typed in the editor, so reuse a spelling rather than inventing a near duplicate: clients see it as the kind line on the card.
• Library shows every article in the account. Mine narrows to the ones you wrote.
• The row menu (the three dots) publishes, unpublishes or deletes without opening the article. Every row opens the editor.

Writing one

New article creates a draft called “Untitled article” and opens the editor. Everything you type saves on its own; the word next to the title says Saved, Saving or Unsaved changes, and you can leave whenever it says Saved.

The body is blocks. Type / at the start of an empty line and a menu offers headings, bulleted and numbered lists, a quote, a callout (a tinted box for a tip, a note or a warning), an image or video from your content library, a YouTube video, a table, a divider and a code block. Select some text to make it bold, italic, underlined or a link. Paste a YouTube link on its own line and it becomes the player.

Images and videos come from the library. Choosing one places a reference, not a copy: if you later replace the file in the library, every article showing it updates. A caption box appears under each one. Wide or centred is a toggle on the block.

Cover and excerpt live on the right, with the other things you decide once. The cover is an image from the library and shows on the card and at the top of the article. The excerpt is the sentence or two a client sees on the card; leave it empty and the opening words are used instead.

Category and slug live on the right. The category is free text and becomes the kind line on the client’s card. The slug is set once from the title and stays put when you rename the article; you can edit it, and it is kept unique within your account.

Preview opens the article exactly as a client’s phone renders it, in light and dark.

Who sees it

Change next to the audience opens a dialog with two choices.

• Everyone: every active client of the account.
• Saved audiences: tick one or more audiences you have defined. A client sees the article when they are in any of the ticked audiences.

An audience is a named segment of clients you define once and reuse: “Onboarding + At risk”, “Overweight + Churn risk”, “Active clients”. It is a list of conditions, and a client is in the audience only when they match every condition. Each condition is either a set of lifecycle stages or a set of client labels, and any one of the values in a condition will do. So:

• Stage: Onboarding and Label: At risk reaches new clients who are already flagged.
• Label: Overweight and Label: Churn risk reaches clients carrying both labels.
• Label: VIP or Marathon prep is one condition, and reaches either.

Each audience shows how many clients match it right now, so you can tell before publishing whether “Onboarding + At risk” is seven people or nobody. New audience and the pencil on an existing one open the same form inside the dialog, so aiming an article never means leaving it. Editing an audience changes who every article aimed at it reaches, at once.

A label or stage you delete later stops matching and the audience is flagged. Deleting an audience leaves the articles that used it reaching nobody through it; re-aim them. If an article is aimed at no audience, it publishes but no client sees it, and the dialog says so.

There is a second door that the audience does not control: a client whose plan attaches the article (see below) can always open it once it is published.

Publishing

Publish makes the article live for its audience: it appears in the client app’s Learn tab, newest first, and inside any plan it is attached to. Unpublish takes it back to a draft; clients lose it immediately, and when you publish again it keeps its place in the order.

Publishing runs one check first. Protocol is a wellness product, and that depends on what the product says, including what you write in it. If the text reads as a medical claim, for example that a protocol diagnoses, treats or prevents a named condition, or that a result is “abnormal”, the article is not published and a dialog lists each phrase and where it is. Reword it in wellness language (perform, recover, sleep, energy, healthy ageing; “supports” rather than “treats”) and publish again. There is no way to publish over the check.

Sharing one outside Protocol

Everything above puts an article in front of your clients, in the app. Share puts it on the open web: a page anyone can open without signing in, and an embed you can paste into your own website.

The button sits beside Publish in the editor and opens one dialog.

• Link. A page with the article on it, styled the way the client app styles it. Send it in an email, put it in a newsletter, post it anywhere. No account, no sign-in.
• Embed on your own site. A short piece of HTML. Paste it into a page on your own website and the article appears inside it, in its own styling, resizing itself to fit the space. If you would rather the link worked only as a page, turn Allow embedding off.
• Expires. Optional. Leave it empty for a link that keeps working, or set a date after which it stops.
• Revoke link turns it off at once, everywhere it has been pasted.

Three things are worth knowing before you use it:

• The article must be published. A public link only ever serves a published article, which is also what keeps the wording check in front of it. Take an article back to draft and its public link stops working straight away.
• It ignores your audiences. In the app an article reaches exactly the clients its audience rules name. A public link reaches whoever has it, and Protocol does not know who that is. Share the ones you would be happy to see on your own homepage.
• The link is the only lock. It is hard to guess and easy to revoke, but anyone it is forwarded to can open it.

Attaching an article to a plan

A plan’s Content section can hold articles alongside its files and recipes. Add one there and every client on that plan reads it inside the plan, in the client app, whether or not the audience rules would otherwise reach them. The article still has to be published.

What a client sees

In the client app, published articles appear at the top of the Learn tab as cards: cover, category, title, excerpt. In the new app design they also have a Learn section on the client’s Home screen: the newest article as a large card, and the others in a row beneath it that scrolls sideways, with See all leading to the Learn tab. The section only shows up once the client can see at least one article. Opening one shows the article in the app’s own light or dark style, with your images, videos, callouts and tables, and links opening outside the app. An article a client cannot see, because it is a draft or aimed elsewhere, does not appear at all, and a link to it shows nothing.

Articles and the agent

If you work with the Protocol agent, it can write, edit, aim and publish articles for you from plain Markdown, save audiences by name, and attach articles to a plan. The same publishing check applies to what it writes.