5 Functional Documentation WordPress Plugins
Much has been said about how WordPress is accessible to people without a strong technical background. And it’s all true! However, sometimes you can get stuck, or want to tinker with the out-of-the-box solutions, or just want to know how things work. Logging changes and tweaks you’ve made is important. For this, you’ll want to take a look at this list of documentation WordPress plugins.
The main purpose of documentation, and, consequently, of these plugins, is saving time on your customer support: you can really get to the nuts and bolts in your documentation, making it easy for your clients to find a solution themselves. Your clients will only contact your support if they cannot find the information they need in the documentation included. You can also use them to provide instructions, user guides and manuals for any product you may be selling.
Of course, if all else fails, your visitors can always contact you using a contact form.
These, like most other WordPress plugins, can be made to do more than they are originally created for. So have a look even if you are not specifically interested in documentation: maybe there is something else here you can use.
Echo Knowledge Base is an easy to set up, versatile tool – it comes with an installation wizard and you can get it up and running within minutes. This plugin is meant to work as an information base for internal or external purposes. The free version alone has a very broad gamut of options, from layout and colour options, to a branching structure up to five categories deep.
This plugin obviously works best as an extensive help document on its own, but can be repurposed into a succinct FAQ page or even a helpful intranet for your team of employees. You may assign your users titles and roles, and organize your content input in the style of a wiki, or with varying access levels by category of user.
The plugin creates pages which are easily navigable, with a table of contents feature that automatically detects headings, and easily searchable with tags assignable to each item.
Notable features:
- Fast Search Bar
- SEO Friendly
- Elementor Compatible
- WPML Compatible
Embed Any Document is a simple tool that does exactly what it says on the tin: it lets you embed a document as a single block. It uses either Google Docs Viewer or Microsoft Office Online (your choice) to display it, so no additional plugin is necessary, provided your file comes in one of the supported formats: PDF, Adobe Illustrator (.ai), Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power Point, Text (.txt) and some others.
This embedded documents can have a variety of uses. You may use them to supply your customers with instruction manuals, catalogues, brochures and publications. If you are a publisher, this is also an easy avenue for you to tease chapters and parts of your upcoming issues.
It has a minimal interface, and is therefore easy to use, though some users have reported issues when trying to embed larger documents.
Notable features:
- Cross-Browser Compatibility
- No Additional Plugin Needed
WP Help allows administrators to create a hierarchical article structure for use by the website’s editors and contributors. This is especially useful for designers, as clients will have a handy help document they can browse before contacting you for details on how to use their own website. What we liked best was this plugin’s ability to refer to help documents form other installs and update them in real time, allowing a designer only to change the help files once for any number of clients’ websites.
Notable features:
- Easy To Create, Edit and Arrange Communication
- Easy To Update
Memphis Documents Library allows you to embed documents into your websites, with some interesting additional features. For instance, with this plugin, you also get a preview of the embedded documents for the supported formats. These are browser-dependent, and a comprehensive list of formats may be found on the plugin’s page linked above, but PDF and most common image files, such as JPEG, .ai, .psd and .gif are supported.
This plugin also comes with some other noteworthy features, such as a frontend upload button, so that users may add to the document list, an import system which keeps the already existing files or overwrites them as you choose, and an export functionality which compresses all your documents into an archive. Each document may also be upplied with social media buttons for easy sharing.
Notable features:
- Batch Upload
- Version Control
- Compatible with WordPress Search
weDocs is another easy way to host documents, and also to create and edit documents within the WordPress framework. It is especially geared towards WordPress developers to include an easy help section for the end user. Apart form easy document creation and editing, weDocs also allows you to rearrange them, simply using a drag-and-drop command. Finally, you may want to judge the usefulness or helpfulness of your documents to your visitors. With this plugin, you can include a thumbs up or down rating system for each document.
Notable features:
- SEO Friendly
- Multilingual (4 Supported Languages)
To Conclude
Documentation can be a slog, but it needs to be done, and it needs to be done consistently. Fortunately, these WordPress plugins are there to make it as easy for you as possible. Also, as we have shown, these plugins have a variety of uses beyond providing a help section. Use them to reach out to your visitors, clients and users, and explore the endless possibilities WordPress has to offer.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!