Your help center, powered by Mintlify

Companies like Lovable and Dub already use Mintlify to power their help and support centers alongside their documentation. As more teams adopt this pattern, we've been investing in features that make the help center experience even better. Today, we're launching two new capabilities: a ready-to-go help center template and automatic directory pages in docs.json.

A help center in one command

The new help center starter template gives you a complete, ready-to-publish help center site. Run one command and you get the full structure: homepage, category pages, article stubs, configuration, and styles.

mint new --template help-center-starter --name "My Help Center"

The template includes:

• A search-first hero with a large, centered search bar and a row of popular search terms beneath it
• Category cards linking to top-level content areas like "Getting Started," "Billing," and "Integrations," each with an icon, title, and short description
• Suggested articles for your highest-traffic or most common-question pages

From there, the workflow is the same as the rest of your docs: customize content, swap card destinations, adjust styles, and fill in your own articles. You can see a live example at help-center-starter.mintlify.app.

The --template flag also works in CI/CD pipelines and with AI coding agents, so you can automate help center scaffolding as part of your setup workflow.

Read the full guide on building a help center with Mintlify in the documentation.

Directory pages that maintain themselves

The second update is a new directory option in docs.json that works across every Mintlify theme.

When you add "directory" to a navigation object, Mintlify automatically renders a listing of child pages and nested groups below the MDX content on group root pages. Titles, descriptions, icons, and article counts are all pulled from your existing configuration. No duplicate link lists to maintain.

Two layouts are available:

Accordion: each group appears as a bordered card with a header row and indented child pages beneath it. Groups with a root page link to it with a chevron; groups without one show a static header.

{
  "navigation": {
    "directory": "accordion",
    "groups": [
      {
        "group": "Getting Started",
        "root": "getting-started/index",
        "pages": ["getting-started/quickstart", "getting-started/installation"]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Card: child pages and nested groups render as horizontal cards, with group headings above them linking to the group root when one exists.

{
  "navigation": {
    "directory": "card",
    "groups": [...]
  }
}

Inheritance makes it easy to scale

The directory setting inherits through your navigation tree. Set it once on the root navigation object or on a tab, and every group root in that scope gets a directory automatically. Override specific groups with "none", "accordion", or "card" wherever you need something different.

This means you can enable accordion directories across your entire help center tab, then switch to cards for a specific section, all from docs.json.

Better together

The help center starter template gives you the homepage experience with search, category cards, suggested articles, while the directory feature handles the section landing pages deeper in your content hierarchy. Together, they cover the full information architecture of a help center without requiring you to build any of it from scratch.

For teams evaluating where to host customer-facing support content, this is a complete starting point. For existing Mintlify users, the directory feature works on any theme and any docs project, not just help centers.

Get started

Install or update the Mintlify CLI, then create your help center:

mint new --template help-center-starter --name "My Help Center"

To add directory pages to an existing project, add the directory property to any navigation object in your docs.json:

{
  "navigation": {
    "directory": "accordion"
  }
}

Check out the help center starter demo to see the template in action, and read the directory documentation for the full configuration reference.