Getting Started

Table of Contents

Upon plugin activation, 3 pages are automatically created for you, titled:

  1. Documentation,
  2. {docs_category_name}
  3. {docs_article_name}

You can change the title of “Documentation” to whatever you like, but it’s important that the title of {docs_category_name} and {docs_article_name} remain intact.

These are placeholders that are used by the plugin to render the actual title of the currently viewed category or article.

In the contents of these pages you’ll find a few shortcodes:

You can dress up the pages however you like, but it’s important that these shortcodes remain in place somewhere on the page. These shortcodes are used to render the contents of the currently viewed category or article.

Since the pages are never updated in WordPress directly, the plugin contains a [docs_article_last_updated] shortcode which is used to render the last updated date of the article. It contains the needed schema.org markup, which is used by search engines to understand when the article was last updated in Help Scout Docs.

Setting up Help Scout Docs for WordPress

The plugin’s settings can be found in your admin area under Settings > WP Help Scout Docs.

The settings of WP Help Scout Docs are quite straight forward.

They’re quite straight forward. All you need to do is create an API key in Help Scout, paste it and hit Save Changes.

You can also choose to change the value of the Base option. The default is “docs”, which should suffice in most situations. If you were to change to e.g. “help”, your Docs section can be found at yourdomain.com/help.

After saving your API key, you’ll notice that the Collection option has appeared, containing the available collections in your Help Scout Docs.

Select the collection you wish to connect to your WordPress instance and hit Save Changes again. A Build Docs button will appear.

Building the docs might take a while, depending on the size of your Help Scout Docs. What it does is, basically, is fetch a list of categories, their names, IDs and article titles. These are needed to render the articles when requested.

Using constants to setup WP Help Scout Docs.

It’s possible to setup this plugin using just constants by manually defining them in wp-config.php. This is not required and should only be used by agencies and/or developers.

The following constants are supported:

  • WP_HELP_SCOUT_DOCS_API_KEY overwrites the API Key option.
  • WP_HELP_SCOUT_DOCS_BASE overwrites the Base option.
  • WP_HELP_SCOUT_DOCS_COLLECTION_ID overwrites the Collection option.

It’s important to remember that constants will take precedence over options in the Settings screen at all times. If you wish to return to using the settings page, the constants need to be removed from wp-config.php.