WP Easy Help

1. About
2. Installation
3. How it works
4. How to provide your own help files
5. License

About

WP Easy Help is a wordpress plugin that embeds help files directly into the administration backend, making them easily accessible to most users. It separates this help into three parts:

1. General help, which should mostly be for wordpress in itself and which in case of a network installation is visible to all users.
2. Custom help, which is oriented towards individual blogs in a network installation, allowing the network operators to address special problems users of these blogs might have.
3. Plugin help, which is an accumulation of all help files belonging to special plugins.

Installation

Currently WP Easy Help consists of two parts: a main help directory (not yet available, sorry), which goes straight into the wordpress root directory, and the actual plugin which goes to either wp-content/mu-plugins or wp-content/plugins. In the later case you also need to activate it. Custom help files go to the blogs upload directory into a new help directory. Plugins have to bring their own help files. This way they're always up to date with each plugins capabilities.

How it works

WP Easy Help utilizes static html files, which at their best could also be used completely independent from the plugin. To seamlessly integrate them into the interface of the administration backend it scans and removes the head, deletes the body, html and any DOCTYPE tags and modifies all remaining href and src attributes pointing to local (from wordpress POV) files. At the moment WP Easy Help doesn't cache thoses cleaned files, yet.

To figure out what to serve WP Easy Help uses an additional GET parameter (entry), which consists of the plugin name the help files belong to (or wordpress for general help or you for custom help) and the path of the files within the help structure (not including the help and the locale prefixes). It then searches for the file in several pathes inside the help directories, following this order:

1. The current locale (see get_locale() in the wordpress codex) + the given path.
2. en_US + the given path.
3. assets + the given path.

If WP Easy Help can't find the file at any of these locations, it will display a simple, non-disruptive error message.

How to provide your own help files

There're two reasons and ways to provide your own help files:

1. When you're a network operator and you want to help a certain customer, put them into their upload directory.
2. When you're a plugin developer, put them into your plugins directory (e.g. where the file lies that wordpress reads the definitions from)

In either case you have to comply to a certain structure:

1. There has to be a help directory at the given location.
2. It must contain at least a directory en_US, for the english help. Whenever you don't include an english help, god kills a kitten.
3. The help directory can contain an assets directory for language independent images, videos and more.
4. For every locale you want to offer help files for there must be a directory, e.g. if you want to offer british english there has the be an en_GB, for german de_DE, and so on.
5. In every locale directory (including en_US) there must be an index.html.
6. Within the locale directories you're free to go, but you should keep it the same over all locales, to provide easy fallbacks for missing translations. You should also refrain from using anything but ASCII for the filenames.

License

The plugin is licensed under GPLv3