With a good product in hand or offering an amazing service, it is expected that it will be backed by a nice documentation or help guide. Common term for such documentation portal is Knowledge Base. After reading about the features of the released product e.g. software, WordPress theme, plugins etc. people usually move to check if a well documented knowledge base is present. It helps users in implementing and using the product without contacting the developer or concerned support team.
A good knowledge base also helps developer or company by reducing the number of support queries.
There are many ways through which you can create a knowledge base such as third-party cloud hosted platforms, Wiki platforms, custom HTML pages etc. In this tutorial, I will explain how to create a beautiful and neat knowledge base using WordPress with Documentor plugin.
Documentor, a WordPress plugin, enables you to can create and manage multiple documentation for different products or services. One can create a knowledge base or help solutions page using existing posts, pages, custom post types or by adding new documents (another Custom Post Type provided by Documentor). With the help of drag and drop method, it becomes very easy to maintain already created documentations as well.
The Knowledge Base created using Documentor can have two types of operations.
- Inline Documentation
- Ajax Enabled Documentation
Inline Documentation – A single page layout with fixed menu in left panel and content area in right side. The right side content will be highlighted depending on the click on left panel. All the documents are already loaded and appearing on the page, but when clicked on left menu, the highlighted content will scroll up or down. This operation is very easy to navigation as well as help in searching something on browser using CTRL + F key from the keyboard.
Ajax Enabled Documentation – If the documentation is very lengthy and bulky, it is suggested not to load the complete content at first. In this operation, when the left menu is clicked, the corresponding content will load from server using AJAX. It means the page will not get loaded, but the content will change.
Knowledge Base with User Feedback
A good knowledge base should have an option to receive feedback from visitors as well. It is available with Documentor where user can submit feedback by saying whether the documentation helped or requires some changes. The administrator will not notified about the feedback instantly.
To move the knowledge base from one domain to another, it comes with export/import feature. It allows you to move the documentation as well as the settings to new domain or even to a new server. This scenario comes if you want to move the knowledge base from test server or domain to production server. No need to put the effort of creating the knowledge base again or use some MySQL export/import methods. Just use our UI option to replicate the same knowledge base again on new server or domain.
Search Field for Better Search
Search in Knowledge Base is also what is required for good navigation and help. You will find a search box placed just above the left menu for easy search by the users. It searches and highlights the results for better access.
For offline reading, Documentor is having an option to download the complete knowledge base and read it later even if not connected with the Internet. Very helpful feature for those who want to go through the help documentation on the go.
Conclusion
As a matter of fact, a good Knowledge Base or Help Guide Documentation can be created using WordPress with the Documentor plugin. For the design implementation, the plugin comes with 5 ready skins to make the Knowledge base look professional and neat.
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