Dashboard help plugins

These are 6 admin help plugins that were discussed here to possibly look at to get ideas of what other ppl are doing that we may want to scrounge from. What follows is my fairly quick, first-pass reactions/notes.

SH Contextual Help – threw lots of errors, using old, deprecated functions and bad roles and permissions stuff. It’s meant to add to the existing help tabs, so nothing for us here, really.

Custom Dashboard Help WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. – adds a widget to the dashboard as you’d expect. Not sure this is the ultimate solution.

Screen Options and Help Show Customize – what @hanni said: “not a help pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party per se, allows customisation of help tab display.” AFAICT, this is mostly just for disabling the help tabs and/or show options so, kind of the opposite of what we’re doing. 🙂

WP Help – as mentioned by @sleary pretty much the best part of this is the location because it’s not the tab at the top and it’s right in the annoying top of the left sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. space that Jetpack usually occupies.

Help Menu – also throws tons of errors because the code is bad, and also occupies the top of the left sidebar so it’s really freaking obvious. This adds 4 new links, one of which is a bunch of screencasts on different things including several from WordPress.tv and one that’s a bunch of screenshots with confusing annotations and no descriptions that seem like they do more harm than good. As with WP Help, the best thing this has going for it is location.

Help for WP – again occupies the top of the left sidebar. Seems to do links to video tutorials? There weren’t very many available. Again, positioning is the best thing this has going for it.

As you can probably tell, I wasn’t overly impressed by any of these. If we scrap the content, which would be completely different anyway, none of them are doing a whole lot that’s new or interesting other than moving the help to the top of the sidebar so it’s more visible. And even that is somewhat dubious and may or may not be that much better of a solution. HOWEVER, it does make me wonder about putting a help link in the Dashboard menu (e.g. under Updates).

#3-8, #admin-help