Steve Grunwell

Van Patten Media

It’s common practice for digital agencies to build a WordPress site/theme then simply hand it off to the client for day-to-day updating. The developers work hard to strike a balance between replicating the designer’s vision and making the theme easy for the client to use. As the design becomes more complex the developer faces questions: Will the client remember to wrap this in a <code><blockquote></code>? Can we count on the content manager remembering to add <code>class="btn"</code> to that link?
It can be equally frustrating from the client side. You don’t want to deal with learning HTML but you want your content to look just as well formatted as the stuff the agency put in at launch. The agency sent over a formatting/style guide but it never seems to be around when you need it.
WP Client Reference attempts to solve these problems by embedding client documentation directly into WordPress. Now agencies can include style guides, tutorials, FAQs, and more without worrying about content managers on the client side not knowing how to format that complicated call-to-action. It’s also useful for any type of team to keep track of information (with versioning) right within WordPress.
<h3>Special Thanks</h3>
Thank you to duckgoesoink for catching the Knowledgebase/User conflict fixed in 0.41.

WP Client Reference

Create a reference guide for clients right in the WordPress administration area.

KonstruktStudio

<h3>WordPress Knowledge Base plugin</h3>
MinervaKB is flexible and powerful WordPress knowledge base plugin. It helps you to create a simple, yet powerful helpdesk or FAQ solution. You can add articles, organise them into topics and build a home page with AJAX live search for your customers to find their answers quickly. Use box or list layout with predefined design and styles. Dedicated search results page is also present. Using plugin as opposed to dedicated knowledge base theme also helps SEO of your main site greatly, as you don’t need to move your help content to subdomain.
You can check the demo here: <a href="http://demo-lite.minerva-kb.com/" title="Knowledge base for WordPress" rel="nofollow ugc">Minerva Knowledge Base Lite demo</a>
MinervaKB Lite key features:
<ul>
<li>Powerful, yet easy to use</li>
<li>Fast live AJAX search</li>
<li>Beautiful design</li>
<li>Unlimited articles and topics</li>
<li>Drag n drop topic selection on home page</li>
<li>List and box view</li>
<li>Font Awesome icons selector for articles and topics</li>
<li>Fully responsive</li>
<li>Intuitive options panel</li>
<li>Estimated reading time in articles</li>
<li>Views count in articles</li>
<li>Dynamic breadcrumbs</li>
<li>Customizeable URL slugs (via post type setting)</li>
<li>Recent topics and articles widgets</li>
<li>Nested topics support</li>
<li>Dedicated sidebars for home, topics, tags, search results page and articles pages</li>
<li>Easy localisation from options panel</li>
<li>Uses custom post types, so your content is not locked to plugin</li>
<li>Developer friendly – lots of actions in templates</li>
<li>Styles options</li>
<li>Quick, tested on many commercial sites and with many different themes</li>
<li>Clean code </li>
</ul>
Plugin is developer-friendly. We use many actions in templates and you can even copy template files to your theme and override plugin templates! To do so, create minerva-kb folder in the root of your theme and copy files from plugins/minervakb/lib/templates there. But this is optional, as you can modify templates via actions.
In case you need to use this plugin in language other than English, no localisation plugin or additional effort is required, as all the strings used on client-side are available to edit in options panel.
We tested MinervaKB Lite on many free and premium themes and it works surprisingly well with most of them. So it should work with any theme coded according to WordPress standards and respecting WordPress template hierarchy.
If you like this plugin and find it useful, you really should check the PRO version at <a href="https://www.minerva-kb.com/" title="Knowledge base for WordPress with Analytics" rel="nofollow ugc">MinervaKB – Knowledge base for WordPress with Analytics</a>.
It has all the features of Lite plus:
<ul>
<li>Built-in Analytics dashboard</li>
<li>7 beautiful search themes</li>
<li>Articles ratings and feedback</li>
<li>KB home page builder</li>
<li>Dynamic table of contents in articles with ScrollSpy</li>
<li>Content restriction by user role</li>
<li>Related articles</li>
<li>Articles drag-n-drop reorder</li>
<li>Extended styles and typography options</li>
<li>Dynamic topics (most liked, most viewed, recent)</li>
<li>Custom settings for each topic, such as images, colors and icons</li>
<li>Content shortcodes, like tip, related links, warning and others</li>
<li>Search on article and topic pages</li>
<li>Options, options and more options. You can configure almost everything from options panel</li>
<li>Google Analytics integration</li>
<li>Professional quick support</li>
<li>Regular updates and bugfixes</li>
<li>…many more</li>
</ul>

MinervaKB Lite

MinervaKB Lite is a fully responsive knowledge base plugin for WordPress with live search.

WP Client Reference vs MinervaKB Lite