FEATURES

Main Page

Note:

This guide assumes that you already have the articles and categories set. If not, check this article first on how to create articles and assign it to particular categories/topics and then follow this guide.

Main page is the front page the which will contain all the topics/categories, the articles, welcome area, search box and much more. This will be the home page where users usually lands at first.

There are three main ways that could be used to create your Kb/Wiki Main page.

• One is using our Helpie settings (That lets you create our Archive Main page)
• Using Elementor page builder (Which you can use to create your own Main page for more customization’s and to fit seamlessly with the design of your site)
• Using Helpie Shortcodes

Create Main Page using Helpie settings

First let’s see how to create our Archive Main page using Helpie Main page settings.

The main page settings let you control how your Knowledge Base/Wiki Main page works and is arranged.

Main page settings can be found in Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie settings  -> Main Page.

Step 1: Choose your Template type

i) Template

Basically Helpie allows five different template types for your Knowledgebase/Wiki Main page.

You can choose to have the sidebar on the left or on the right or can have sidebars on both sides. You can also choose to have a full width template (without wrapper) or can have a boxed-width template.

ii) Sidebar

If you choose to have a template with sidebar, this option help you to choose which registered sidebar you want to appear in these positions.

You can choose either our Helpie sidebar or other registered sidebars of WordPress. Helpie sidebar does allow you include our Table of contents on your sidebar. You can check this article to know more about the Helpie Table of contents.

Sidebar1 is for single sidebar. Sidebar2 is for the 2nd sidebar when the template has two sidebars.

Step 2: Choose your Main page

i) Where do you want your main page

This option lets you to choose whether our Custom post type Archive as your Kb Main page or to have your own page (created using Elementor or shortcodes). Since we are looking at creating our own Archive Main page using our settings, set the option to CPT Archive.

ii) Main Page Slug

By default, the wiki/knowledgebase slug is ‘pauple_helpie’. But you can change it to any unique string you want. If you set this value to say ‘help’. Then your wiki/knowledgebase will be located at www.yourdomain.com/help.

If you want to visit the Main page, you can directly go to the Main Page by just clicking the “Visit Main Page” near it.

Hero Section

Knowledge Base Main Title

Under the Hero section control tab, you can set the Main Title of the Knowledgebase/wiki. The title which you set will be displayed on the main page of the wiki/knowledgebase as shown above. 

Knowledge Base Sub-Title

You can also change the Knowledge base-subtitle which will be displayed right below the Main title.

Search Display

You can enable/disable search to displayed on the Main page.

Meta Data

Main page Meta title & description:

You can set a meta title and description for your Main page for SEO purposes. Make sure you keep your meta title between 60 and 64 characters and your meta descriptions between 150 and 154 characters.

Main Page Components Settings:

Show Stats

If you want the total Number of articles, topics and the total number of contributors to be displayed on your main page you can enable this option. This might give your readers an overview of your Knowledgebase/wiki. It will appear just below the welcome area of your Main Page.

Main Page – Categories

The categories/topics can be hidden from the main page using this checkbox.

Show Article Listing:

You can enable it to display the articles in your Main page. To know more about article listing: Article Listing Shortcodes and Widget

Main Page Categories Listing style

The main page template lets you from 3 different layout types for your Kb main page.

1. Boxed:

In this type, Only the main category title and description will be shown on the Main Page. You can also add Images or icons to main category title from Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Wiki Category.

You can show or hide the description using the “Show Description” option.

2. Boxed1:

In this type, both the main category/topic title and the articles name will be shown on the Main Page. You can also add Images or icons to main category/topic title from Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Wiki Category.

3. Modern:

Modern design is the third template which will have a modern look

Show description:

You can either show/hide description of your categories under the category/topic title.

Image/Icon:

You can either set an image of your own or choose icons for your Main page categories.

Children type:

You can set to display articles of that category or their sub-categories or even nothing.

Number of columns:

This option let you choose the number of columns of the main page categories listing.

Number of articles under each category:

You can choose how many articles to show under each category in your Kb/Wiki main page. The number of articles will be seen only in the Boxed1 and modern template.

Main Page Categories:

The main page categories option is a drag and drop feature where you can drag and drop to re-order the categories, Remove a category from the list by just dragging it to right, and add a category to the list by just dragging it again to the left to be shown in the main page.

Single Article page

The Singe page settings let you control how the single article page of your Knowledgebase/wiki works and is arranged.

Single page settings can be found in Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie settings  -> Single Article Page.

Template Source:

You can either use our Helpie default template for your single page or you can use the Theme Single template to get the template of your theme or Elementor theme builder template.

Template:

This option lets you choose the template for the single page. You can choose from left-sidebar, right-sidebar, both-side-sidebars, no-sidebar, full width.

Sidebar:

Select which registered sidebar you want to appear in these positions. Sidebar1 is for the single sidebar. Sidebar2 is for the 2nd sidebar when the template has two sidebars.

Single Post Label:

You can change the label of the single post here. By default, it is articles. You can change it as you wish.

Show Search:

Show / Hide Search.

Show Author name:

If you want to Display the Author name on your article page, You can enable this feature. You can also disable it if you don’t want the name of the author to be shown.

Show Last Updated on:

This will display when the article has been last updated.

Show Number of Reads:

If you want to display the number of reads for an article to your users, you can enable this feature.

Voting:

People who are not logged in can also Vote.

You can choose between classic and emotion voting as shown below or hide them altogether.

Voting label:

You can change the voting label.

Allow non-logged in users to vote:

You can either allow the non-logged in users to vote or you can disable it altogether.

Comments:

Show / Hide comments.

Single Post – Title color:

If you want to set a color for your article title, you can use this option.

Category page

Category page settings can be found in Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie settings  -> Category Page.

The Category page settings let you control how the categories of your Knowledgebase works and is arranged.

Template:

This option lets you choose the template for the categories. You can choose from left-sidebar, right-sidebar, both-side-sidebars, no-sidebar.

Sidebar1, Sidebar2:

Select which registered sidebar you want to appear in these positions. Sidebar1 is for the single sidebar. Sidebar2 is for the 2nd sidebar when the template has two sidebars.

Search Display:

Show / Hide Search.

Category Page Slug:

You can change the Category page slug here if you want. By default the category page slug is heldesk_category.

Category Page- Title Color:

You can set a color for your category titles.

Search settings

Search placeholder text:

You can change the search placeholder text as you wish.

No Query text:

You can choose what text to be displayed when they have not searched anything. (When they have not typed anything and pressed “Enter” in Search box)

Empty Search Result Label:

You can choose what should be displayed when the search does not match any articles.

Show Featured Image:

You can show/hide the featured image of the articles in the search results page.

Show Meta Data:

You can show/hide the Meta data of the articles in the search results page.

Show Result Description:

You can show/hide the description of the articles in the search results page.

Show Tags:

You can show/hide the tags of the articles in the search results page.

Description length:

You can set the length of the description to be displayed in the search results page.

Style:

You can completely customize the search results page using our styling option.

You can choose the font family, font size, line height, letter spacing and even font color.

You can customize these styles for your Header, Title, Category, Meta Data, Search Text of the search results.

You can also control the border size, padding, margin size, etc..

Search Box:

You can customize the search box style here. You can set color and style for Subtitle border or you can disable the border altogether using the checkbox “Show border“.

To know more about it, check this article: https://helpiewp.com/helpie-introducing-autolinking/

Publishing capabilities (FRONT END EDITOR)

With Helpie, You can now make collaborative content creation and sharing much simpler and easier.

Front-End editing Capabilities:

Using the Front-end editing feature, you can allow any user to add or edit or delete an article or a category from the Front-end without the need to go to the backend.

To enable the front-end, go to Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie Settings -> Frontend Editor -> Enable Frontend Editing.

Number of Revisions:

Any number of changes could be made for an article and all changes will be saved as Revisions as seen below.

Now the user with approving capability (More about it below) can approve any revision and can revert back to any revision. You can limit the number of revisions to any count as you wish in the “Number of Revisions” box.

Note: If you have started to edit the article using the Front-end editor, you cannot change it to edit by using any other page builder like Elementor later. Vice-versa also remains the same.

The same applies for all editors. You cannot use two different editors for the same article. This is because each editor changes the post_content differently. And processes html in post_content differently. Please check this article to know more about this:

Here in the Front-end Categories box, you can see all the categories and subcategories which have been created in the back-end. You can also create a new category from here.

Editor type:

We have two editor types, one is the inline editor which is more of a medium like an editor and the other is the WordPress TinyMCE editor which will have all capability as the WordPress backend editor.

User-Role Capabilities:

Using our Dynamic capabilities feature, you can give permission to edit, publish and approve articles based on user roles, user names, logged in users or even everyone. You can also set no one to have this permission.

Can edit capability:

People with “can_edit” capability can add any new article from the front-end but cannot publish it or could not select categories. As you can see in the screenshot above, he/she can only submit for Review. His/her article will be saved as pending in the back-end and only admin or the one who has the approver role can approve the post and assign a category to it.

The one with edit capability can also edit posts which are published by others which will be saved as revisions. You can also allow anyone to edit your article by selecting “All” in the can_edit capability. You can also limit it to only certain people based on user roles, user name, or only logged in users.

The best part about our dynamic capabilities feature is that you set this capability on all global, topic and article level.

To set it in Global level, go to Dashboard -> Helpie kb Wiki -> Helpie settings -> Dynamic capabilities -> Can_edit. Here you can set the permissions.

To set it for a particular topic, go to Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Wiki category -> Go to that particular category and edit it. You can see the capabilities in the left bottom.

In the same way, to set it for a particular article go to that article and edit where you will find the same option as shown above.

Can publish capability:

The same applies to publishing and approving capability. People with “can_publish” capability can add any new article from the front-end and can publish it without the need to be approved. He can also choose categories in which that article should be published.

He/she can also edit and publish changes made by others but can only see the last revision for an article. He can’t see all the changes done in that article. You can also allow anyone to publish your article.

Everything else remains the same as what has been explained in Can-edit capability above.

Can approve capability:

People with this capability can approve the article published by “Can edit” capability. He can also see all the changes done for that article and can publish any revision done for that article.

By default, Administrator will have all user capabilities assigned.

For more details on dynamic capability, kindly check this article: https://helpiewp.com/dynamic-capabilities/

Design

Layout:

Wrapper width:

You can set the wrapper width of your kb/wiki pages using this option. You can set this in pixels, percentage or em.

Overall Margin – Top:

Does your header clashes with our Knowledgebase Module. Do you want to move down the knowledgebase module so that it doesn’t clash with your header?

You can use the ‘Overall Margin-Top’ feature to move down the knowledgebase module to as you wish. You can use this feature on your desktop, Tablet, and Mobile.

Typography:

You can customize everything you need for all the heading tags from h1 to h6 including the p tag.

To know more about it, check this article: https://helpiewp.com/helpie-introducing-autolinking/

Password Settings:

Feature Introduction:

Password Protection feature was first in version 1.0.6. It lets you create passwords for your kB/Wiki categories and lets users access these password-protected category content only after entering the password. You can assign multiple categories to the same password, and create multiple such passwords.

How to create a new password:

To create a new password,

1. Go to WP Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie Settings -> Password Settings
2. Click ‘Add New Password’ (The + symbol)
3. New password fields should appear, you can choose the categories from the sidebar field
4. Then, enter your password in the password field
5. Click ‘Save Changes’

Delete password:
To delete a password,

1. Go to WP Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie Settings -> Password Settings
2. Click on the delete button (The X symbol in the right corner)
3. Once confirmed, your password should be deleted

Update password:

To update an existing password or update the categories, just change the values in the correct fields and click ‘Save Changes’

User Access Restriction (Dynamic capabilities):

Not every time you may want everyone to see all of your articles.

Do you want to restrict access to your content to a certain set of users?

Helpie has a powerful Dynamic capability feature where you can control who can view your content on all levels such as Global, topic and article level.

Global level:

If you do not want to restrict a particular category or an article, but want to hide all the categories and articles to certain users, you can restrict it in our Global level.

To set it, go to Dashboard -> Helpie Kb Wiki -> Helpie Settings -> Dynamic capabilities -> Can view.

We have different permissions to restrict your content.

1. ALL: This option will not restrict your content to anyone, but will be displayed to everyone.
2. NO ONE: This option will hide all your categories and articles from everyone. Only Admin could see it. By default, Admin could see everything. Restriction won’t apply for the Administrator role.
3. LOGGED-IN USERS: If you want your topics and articles to be visible only for logged in users, you can use this option.
4. ROLE: You can restrict your content to only certain user roles using this option. The default WordPress user roles will be available under this option.
   We have two rules to set this option. First is “Everyone except” where you can let every other user role to view your content except this particular user role. Second is “Only” which will let you allow only that user role to view the content.
5. USERNAME: Using this option, you can restrict your content to only certain users by their WordPress user name. The two rules”Everyone except” and “Only” will also be available for this condition.

Topic level:

If you want to restrict only a particular category to certain users, you can use this option.

To do this, go to Dashboard -> Helpie kb Wiki -> Wiki category. Go to that particular category and edit it. If you scroll down, you will see an option “Can view” where you could restrict that category alone from certain users.

The same five permissions which we described above will apply for this topic level also.

Article-level:

If you want to restrict a particular article alone, you can use this option.

To do this, go to Dashboard -> Helpie kb Wiki -> All articles. Go to that particular article and edit it. If you scroll down, you will see an option “Can view” where you could restrict that article alone from certain users.

For more on dynamic capabilities, kindly check this article: https://helpiewp.com/dynamic-capabilities/

Table of Contents

Table of contents are found in Dashboard -> Helpie KB Wiki -> Helpie Settings -> Table of contents.

Tag Settings:

NOTE: This feature has been removed from V1.9

This might be extremely useful in case of any feature release. You can include a tag to notify your users that a feature has been released in the latest release by adding a release version tag to it. You can also use the updated tag to show the features which have been updated. You can control to display, only the latest Added tags and Updated tags, or you can show all of them.

Sidebar Settings

Table of Contents Title:

This tab lets you change the sidebar title to your Knowledgebase/Wiki. By default, the sidebar title is set as Table of contents. You can change it to anything you want.

Fixed Sidebar position:

Enabling this feature will fix the sidebar in its position and will not allow it to toggle up and down. You can disable it if you don’t want the sidebar to be in a fixed position.

Sidebar Type:

‘Full Navigation‘ displays every category that is allowed to the current user in the sidebar.

‘In-Page Navigation only’ displays only the articles which have “In-page navigation” in the sidebar.

You can enable this option if you want to add a Wikipedia like a table of contents box on some of your long articles. This Table of contents allows the user to jump directly to the section they want to read, it also makes your posts more SEO friendly.

NOTE: In-page navigation will work only for single page (as shown below). For other pages (Category page and Main page), it will be set as default which is Full Navigation.

Full Navigation settings:

We have two separate settings for full navigation and In-page navigation. Let’s discuss the settings of Full Navigation first.

Show In-page navigation in Table of contents:

If you want to display the In-page navigation of an article within the full navigation sidebar, you can enable this option.

For Example, If you want to create an article on Languages and if you want to explain each language, in brief, You can create a table of contents for it. The table of contents will be created based on heading Tags you give for each language. For Instance, I have added an Article called “Languages” under the category Misc and have added three Languages to it with the heading tags. It will be seen as below

Sidebar categories:

In your sidebar, you can choose to either display all the categories which you have created or you can choose to show only the categories which you have displayed in the Main page.

Toggle Category children:

Enabling this tab displays only the categories title in the sidebar and displays the children of the current category alone. Disabling this tab displays all articles of all category in the sidebar. If you have many articles to a certain category in your Knowledgebase and if you want to hide it in the sidebar, you can use this feature by enabling it. The changes in the sidebar will be seen as shown below. The one on the top is by disabling it and the one on the bottom is by enabling it.
                             

Category anchor link:

If you want to include an anchor link for your categories in the sidebar, you can enable this option.

Number of Child category to show:

If you have many child categories or sub-categories to show,  you can decide to show how many sub-categories to be visible in the sidebar.

Number of Articles to show under each category:

You can choose how many articles to be shown under each category on the main page and on the Sidebar.

Show articles in TOC:

You can show/hide articles in TOC using this option.

In-Page Navigation Settings:

Exclude Headings:

If you want to leave any Header tag in the in-page navigation you can very well remove that using this option.

In-Page Navigation Title:

If you want to change the Title of the In-page navigation in the sidebar, you can use this option. By default, the title will be “In This Article”.

Numeric Bullet:

Arrange your In-page navigation neatly using Numeric bullet option given. If you are using the same heading tag it will be arranged in the numerical order like 1,2,3,4,5 etc.. But if a lower heading tag like H5 has been placed next to H4, it will be taken as a child like 1.1, 1.2, etc..

Section Page URL:

You can select to choose the URL for each heading Tag rather than using the same for all headers. You can also change the URL text if you wish to.

Back to top link:

You can have a back to top link to the side of every header tag which will navigate you to the article text top. If you want it to navigate to the site top, select the option “SCROLL BACK TO SITE TOP”. You can change the title of Scroll back if you wish to.

You can also enable the “SMOOTH SCROLL” option if you want clean navigation to the top.

Autolinking

Auto linking is a new feature introduced in V1.9.1. Enabling this will link your knowledge base articles automatically based on the article titles.

To know more about it, check this article: https://helpiewp.com/helpie-introducing-autolinking/

Components

Breadcrumbs:

Breadcrumbs tab lets you choose on/off Breadcrumb display. A “breadcrumb” (or “breadcrumb trail”) is a type of secondary navigation scheme that reveals the user’s location in a website or Web application

Article order:

You can change the order of the articles which are displayed in the Sidebar (Table of contents) of your Kb.

Asc. Post Date displays the articles in Ascending order of their published date which is from older to latest.

Similarly Desc. Post Date displays the articles in descending order of their published date which is from latest to older.

Menu_order is the default one. By default, it displays in the Ascending type format.

If you want to display the articles in the order you wish, set the Article order as the default Menu_order and go to the Article -> You will see a quick edit option, select it -> You will see a menu called order in the top right corner where you can assign a number which will be the order of that article.

You can also assign it in alphabetical order.