Getting started

Activate the plugin and open Help Centre in the WordPress menu. The dashboard tells you the one thing to do next until there is nothing left to do.

Activating makes the two pages it needs:

• Help centre — holds [trasl_help_centre]: search, topics, the most-read articles and your FAQ;
• Contact support — holds [trasl_my_tickets]: the form, and where a customer reads and replies to a request. A signed-in customer sees their earlier requests here too, with the form for a new one underneath. The links you email people point here.

If either already exists — a page of yours with the shortcode on it — that one is used rather than a second being made. Both are ordinary pages: rename them, move them into a menu, add anything else you like. If you would rather point at different pages, both are settings, under Help Centre and Support Desk.

Delete the plugin with Delete all data on uninstall ticked and a page that still holds nothing but the shortcode goes to the bin along with everything else, so it is there to restore if you wanted the address. A page you have written anything on is yours, and is left exactly where it is.

Both are published straight away, and a theme that lists every page in its menu will show them there at once. Until you publish an article or an FAQ, the help centre shows visitors only the Still stuck? panel that leads to the form, rather than a search box that can find nothing, or a short note when there is no form to lead to. Anyone who can write articles sees a note above it, with buttons to add an article and a topic.

Articles live at /help/article/… and topics at /help/topic/…, and /help/ itself goes to your help centre front page. You can change help to anything under Settings → Help Centre.

Who can read it#

Settings → Help Centre → Who can read it is Everyone unless you change it. Signed-in people only is for a help centre that documents something customers have paid for: the articles, the topic pages, the front page and the search are kept for people with an account on your site, and anyone else is sent to the sign-in page and brought back to where they were going once they have signed in.

Every door is closed, not just the front one. Your theme's own search and the editor's site-wide search stop listing articles, the REST API refuses the article and topic lists, the sitemap leaves them out, and a link to an article pasted into an editor no longer shows a preview card. The search box on the front page is not drawn for a visitor, because a box that can only ever say "Nothing matched" is worse than none.

The support desk is unchanged: a customer's request has its own link and key, and the form is where somebody who cannot find an answer goes. The FAQ shortcode is unchanged too, so an FAQ on a public page stays public.

A page cache is told not to store the sign-in redirect, and a signed-in reader's pages are never served from one, so nobody sees a stored answer meant for somebody else.