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WP Help Docs

The WP Help Docs plugin allows you to integrate help documentation for your WordPress theme or plugin directly into the WordPress admin.

Documentation is written in Markdown, with special extensions that allow linking to other markdown files, linking to admin pages, video embeds, displaying a table of contents and other features.

WP Help Docs also has integrated search functionality.

For examples integrating this documentation plugin with your plugin or theme, check out these examples:

• Example plugin with documentation
• Example theme with documentation

Installation

Install via composer:

Or, install via the WordPress plugin repository.

Or, download the zip file from the releases page and install manually.

Writing Documentation

Documentation Location

If you are writing documentation for your theme, you need to place your documentation in directory called docs in the root of your theme and the plugin will find it automatically.

Documentation for plugins, or for a directory other than docs, you will have to tell the docs plugin where to load it's documentation from. You can do that through the ilab-docs-config filter:

This filter should be added to your plugin's main/entry PHP file or your theme's functions.php.

Directory Structure

The basic directory structure for your docs folder should look like this:

The images folder contains any images included in your documentation. The config.json holds the configuration and table of contents of your documentation. index.md is the initial page of documentation. docs.css is any additional CSS you'd like to include for your documentation.

In addition to this, you'll have additional markdown files for each page of documentation you wish to include.

Configuration

Each document set requires a configuration file. The configuration file is a simple JSON file that provides the title, name of the documentation to display in various menu areas, the logo and the table of contents.

A basic configuration file looks like:

Basics

Title

This is the title of your documentation and is displayed in the documentation's header as well as the page's title.

Menu

This is the title of the documentation when it is displayed in the WordPress admin sidebar.

Logo

This is the logo used in the documentation itself. It can be any valid image type and should be located in the images/ folder of your docs directory.

Toolbar

This the name of the title when displayed in the WordPress admin toolbar.

Standalone

If you are writing plugin documentation, setting this flag to true will make your plugin documentation a top level menu item instead of being grouped in the Plugin Docs admin menus. You shouldn't do this unless your plugin is a must use OR a major plugin with a lot of documentation.

Documentation for themes are always standalone top-level menu items.

Table of Contents

The table of contents is the complete list of all of the pages in your documentation. Each element has a title attribute which is the title to display in the table of contents listing, and a src attribute which is the relative path to the markdown file (sans the markdown extension).

You can auto-generate the table of contents using wp-cli. Simply open a terminal, navigate to your documentation directory and type:

This will parse each markdown file in your documentation directory, and any subdirectories, and build the table of contents array for you.

Markdown Extensions

The WP Help Docs plugin extends markdown in a few ways to facilitate writing cross-referencing documentation.

Linking

You can link to other pages of your documentation using standard markdown links:

The plugin will parse out these links and replace them with the appropriate ones that actually display the pages.

These links are always relative to your docs directory.

Admin Links

Sometimes you will want to link to some part of the WordPress admin. You can do that using an admin: prefix like so:

Local Images

Because your documentation is being displayed on pages that aren't directly related to where they are stored, regular markdown images won't work. Instead, to include images that are relative to your documents directory, you would simply write it without a forward slash:

The plugin will automatically map this the image in your images/ directory regardless of where the documentation is actually being displayed.

Video Embeds

For embedding video content, use the @ symbol like so:

Currently, videos from youtube, vimeo and dailymotion are supported.

Table Header Styles

You can specify CSS classes for table headers using {}:

In the above example, the first column doesn't display any text but uses a css class called callout. The Property column uses a css class called property and the Description column uses a css class called description.

This was added to give more control over table column widths. For example, the actual css for these classes looks like:

The css is included in the docs.css file in your docs directory.

Table of Contents

To display the table of contents in your documentation, simply use @toc():

By default the @toc() will only include the the children toc entries at the current level of the documentation using the function. If you want to include the entire table of contents for all of the documentation you would use: @toc(index).

Search

WP Help Docs supports documentation search through the teamtnt/tntsearch package. But in order to enable search, you'll first have to generate a search index. You can do this from the command line using wp-cli. Open up a terminal and change to your documentation directory. Type the following:

This will then generate a file called docs.index in the root of your documentation directory. That is all you need to do to enable search!

NOTE: You will need to have the PHP SQLite3 extension installed for search to be functional.