An Advanced WordPress Knowledge Base Plugin | Hacker News Reader

An Advanced WordPress Knowledge Base Plugin

helpie.pauple.com

45 pointsessekia24 comments

I like it. Clean looking theme. You won't hear me complaining if someone makes it easy for people to make good documentation.

Static site builders are just annoying enough to use that it's a barrier to keeping documentation updated. You have to have a GitHub repo, write in markdown, and commit changes which means that nontechnical people can't really help keep documentation up-to-date.

I didn't see it in the demo, but how does it handle code snippets? That's the biggest pain-point I have with keeping documentation in WordPress.

Hi,

Here's how it handles code snippets: http://helpie.pauple.com/demo/help/syntax-highlight-and-copy...

Are those snips supposed to be syntax-highlighted? Because they are black on grey as I see them, just FYI.

The GitBook desktop app removes some of those headaches:

- desktop app with a WYSIWYG interface - commits are auto generated on sync

> Making content the centerpiece is our core value. We get the distractions out of your way and let you focus...

This part of the page is comically difficult to read on mobile because of some random background graphics. Gave me a laugh given what it says.

I think they're selling the actual plugin here: https://codecanyon.net/item/helpie-helpdesk-documentation-wo...

Seems so, not that its at all obvious from the page linked to. (Though the homepage is quite a bit more clear about that aspect)

Looks nice.

Search could be a little better. For example "getting started" did not return any results but the page with the same title exists.

Point noted. But, the getting started is the category. We have yet to include 'category' for the search.

Thanks for the feedback!

Looks really nice.

What resources did you use to learn to do plugin development if you don't mind me asking?

The hardest part of WP plugin/theme development is learning how hooks and filters work. Once you've got those down, you get can get wild.

Some great starter plugin resources (in order of my personal preferences for style and organization):

  * https://github.com/DevinVinson/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate

  * https://github.com/hlashbrooke/WordPress-Plugin-Template

  * https://github.com/mattyza/starter-plugin

https://developer.wordpress.org/ really has everything you need. Examples, best practices, function documentation, etc.

If you really want to learn you should find a problem you have and solve it by building a plugin. Practice makes perfect.

Does it play nicely with most popular themes? Anything to be aware of?

It works well with most popular themes. There have been a couple of minor visual issues in the past which we have fixed then and there.

What does this do better than DokuWiki other than WYSIWYG?

Hi,

Helpie is a WordPress plugin, so it can use WordPress' Text Editor or even work with the many amazing Visual Page Builders for WordPress. Putting that together with Helpie's Insights, Search, User Access Control and other features, you have a better overall solution with so many integration possibilities.

Shouldn't this be a Show HN?

*Plugin

Got my hopes up, thought it was Wordpress docs for people doing "modern" stuff with WordPress.

My favorites as an outsider:

· Vagrant for WordPress dev | https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV

· https://versionpress.net version control plugin beta | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439173

It was that discussion that mentioned https://roots.io/ as relevant to "modern" Wordpress dev practices.

Any additional resources people are willing to share would be appreciated!

* The Timber plugin provides an API for clean separation of concerns (lib classes for posts/pages as a model layer, Twig templates for views) and lots of elegant helper functionality to boot. It also includes an undersores-like starter theme that you can copy to take start taking advantage of the plugin's API immediately. Learning Timber is an investment for sure, but it is the single most valuable investment I've ever made in any WordPress-related tech. [0]

* Pantheon is a PaaS for WP and Drupal. [1]

* Lando (beta) [2] and its predecessor Kalabox [3] are container-based dev environments with tight integration with Pantheon.

[0] https://github.com/timber/timber/

[1] https://pantheon.io/

[2] https://docs.devwithlando.io/

[3] https://www.kalabox.io/

Pantheon is great-- I've really enjoyed their tooling and they made stuff like new relic easy to work with.

A couple of things, though:

kalabox is no longer in dev. It's replacement is "Lando": https://github.com/lando/lando

But I spent a good chunk of the last two weeks messing around with kalabox and lando.... I do a whole lot of WP work, and I find that running the amp stack directly on macOS is a lot easier then containerizing things on several levels. I don't have to work with earlier versions of PHP or test against mySQL or Maria directly, so that's probably a pain point I will find eventually, though.

My favourites:

Most well known starter theme (All twenty* themes are based on it): http://underscores.me/

More starter themes, including Bootstrap ones. http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/starter-wordpress-themes/

Some good documentation on some recurring subjects. Published by an author I hold in high regard: https://wp-root.org/

Thanks, we've updated the title to clarify.

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