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How to Add a Help / Resource Section in WordPress Admin

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Are you a freelancer, consultant, or someone who manages a multi-author WordPress site? If so, then you already know what it feels like to explain the same things repeatedly to your clients and users. One of the ways to solve this problem is by providing great help resources and documentation. In this article, we will show you how to add a help section in WordPress admin area with useful articles and resources.

help documents section in WordPress admin area

Who Needs This Help Section?

People who create websites, themes, plugins, and administrators of multi-author WordPress sites. If your users are asking similar questions, then you need to add documentation to your site or in your product. This will allow you to save time and keep your sanity.

For example, on a multi-author WordPress site you can add the help section to let authors know how they should format and style their posts, how to optimize images, and what things they should avoid.

These help sections make it easy for new team members to join and adjust to the workflow.

If you are a WordPress developer, then you can use the help section to let clients know about the features of their new site, how they can customize or make changes, and where they should look for more help.

A lot of WordPress developers and site owners create help section and link to our beginner guides, WordPress tutorials, and WordPress videos.

Video Tutorial

Subscribe to WPBeginner

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Adding A Help Section in a WordPress Site

First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Help plugin. Upon activation, the plugin adds a new Publishing Help menu item in your WordPress admin just under the Dashboard. Clicking on it will take you to the main page of the plugin.

Main screen of WP Help plugin

If you want to configure the plugin settings, then simply click on the Settings button and the plugin’s settings options will appear on the page.

WP Help Settings

You can change the title of the publishing page and the heading for help topics to any thing you want. Under the Menu Location option, you can choose where you want the menu item to appear. The default location is below the Dashboard menu item. You can change that to add it as a sub-menu under Dashboard, above the dashboard, or at the bottom, below all menu items.

The goal of WP Help is to help you avoid answering the same questions repeatedly. It comes with a built-in sync feature which allows you to pull documents from another install as a source. If you want to do that, then you need a secret URL from the source site where you have WP Help installed. Simply copy the Sync Source URL and paste it in Sync Pull to get all documents from the source.

Once you have gone through all the settings options, you need to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

Adding New Help Documentats in WP Help

WP Help uses a custom post type for documentation pages. This custom post type is hierarchical (like pages), which means you can create a new documentation page just like you would create a page in WordPress. On the Publishing Help page, you can add new documentation pages by simply clicking on the Add New button.

On the Add New Help Document screen, you will see the familiar WordPress post editor. You can add images, videos, links, other media types, and use HTML inside your help documents. You can also create a parent or child document to create a nicely structured documentation.

Editing new help document

Note that WP Help documents are only visible in the admin area, and only to users who can create posts. It is also worth noticing that any user who can edit published pages can also edit help documents. This means that on a WordPress site with default user roles, editors and administrators can edit and make changes to help documents. Whereas contributors and authors can only read them, and subscribers can not read help documents.

If you want to add a help section on the front-end of your website to make it available to all users, then you can add a FAQs section on your site.

We hope this article helped you add help / resource section in WordPress admin for your users and clients. Give it a try and let us know how you are using it on your site by leaving a comment below.

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