Documentation Post Type: A WordPress Plugin for Documenting Products

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

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.