Documentation Post Type: A WordPress Plugin for Documenting Products

documentation

A product’s documentation is usually a strong indicator of its quality, but creating docs is often the least exciting aspect of launching something new. Products that lack documentation can create a greater support burden, forcing you to write docs as a defensive measure after the fact.

The free Documentation Post Type plugin may be just the push you need to get started writing docs without a lot of hassle. The plugin creates a custom post type for product documentation. The advantage of storing docs in a custom post type is that you’ll be able to easily organize, export, and maintain your documentation to be separate from your regular posts and pages.

The Documentation Post Type plugin features the following:

  • Registers a “documentation” post type
  • Registers a “documentation-category” taxonomy
  • Registers a “documentation-tag” taxonomy
  • Registers a “product-tag” taxonomy
  • Adds the post count to the admin dashboard

documentation-post-type

Devin Price, owner of DevPress, created the plugin primarily for product documentation but encourages users to adapt it for any purpose. He created it based off of code from Gary Jones’ Dashboard Glancer class and Portfolio Post Type plugin.

The project also includes a Gruntfile.js and package.json file, which Price added for building translation files (.pot). If this isn’t necessary for your project, you can remove them from the plugin package. If you need a quick way to start documenting your products, download the zip file or fork the plugin on GitHub.

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8 responses to “Documentation Post Type: A WordPress Plugin for Documenting Products”

  1. I recommend to also look into the plugin we are developing to create documentation. Codex Creator: (https://github.com/NomadDevs/codex_creator). It creates a codex of plugins (and soon to be themes) from DocBlocks. It scans the selected plugin and builds a post (in the custom post type codex) for each file, function, action and filter that looks very similar to the official WordPress Codex. Currently in Alpha stage, issues and pull requests are welcome! :)
    Introduction video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ8hUHwWAWM

    • I have been looking for good documentation plugins in which I can create logical sections for my tutorials. A docs kind of page. For instance Getting started – Plugins – SEO – Local Development – Menus etc etc to where the user can enter a section and get a list with or without a featured image of available tutorials within the selected section. Having some good UI for adjusting how the docs/index/section page is to look with a nice widget to have in the sidebar.

      For me this would be having another category called docs or something like that users can enter and see the sections. Finding a way to give the option for the user to go to the docs page in addition to selecting various post categories to check out.

      It would be nice if I can either use the existing posts material or/and use a custom post doc type for this.

      There are a lot of sites that could use a kind of library that is easy to check out having logical sections for posts that cover various topics. As one could just enter into a specific topic section and see what posts are available.

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