Writing articles

Help Centre → Articles. These are ordinary WordPress posts of their own type, so you get the block editor, revisions, autosave, media and your SEO plugin's meta box. Nothing here reinvents the editor.

Three things are worth doing on every article:

• Put it in a topic. Topics are what the front page is built from, and what "related articles" uses. A topic can have sub-topics: the front page shows a card for each top-level topic, and its count and list include the articles in its sub-topics.
• Write an excerpt. It becomes the summary in search results and on the article's topic page, and it is weighted in ranking above the body. Without one, the article's opening words are used: the text inside a shortcode, such as an accordion, is kept, and the shortcode's own tag and the address of an embedded video are left out.
• Add keywords. Extra words a customer might search for. The search reads them as well as the article, so an article is found by the word a customer types even when it never uses that word itself.

Order matters. Set the Order field under Page Attributes; topic pages and the front page list articles in that order, then newest. A help centre is a curated shelf, not a blog.

Protected and members-only articles#

An article with a password, or one a membership plugin keeps for its members, shows none of its words in what the help centre draws. Its card on a topic page is the link alone, with no summary, not even a written excerpt. Its excerpt is empty too, so a theme that shows excerpts on topic pages or search results prints none, and neither does the preview card when its link is pasted into a post. The membership plugins recognised are MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, WooCommerce Memberships, Restrict Content Pro, Members (its Content Permissions box), s2Member, Groups and Ultimate Member. A developer can mark articles the same way for any other plugin with the trhc_post_withheld filter.

In the help search (the search box, the suggestions under the request form and the results page that Enter opens), a password-protected article is left out altogether. A members-only one is listed by its title with no summary, and it is found by its title and keywords but not by a word in its body, so nobody can piece it together by searching one word after another. Give such articles the keywords a customer would type.

This is decided for the article, not for the person looking, so members see the same cards and search answers as everybody else: a page cache keeps what one visitor was shown for the next. On the article's own page, WordPress and the membership plugin decide who reads it. Your theme's search of the whole site is WordPress's own: it looks through the words of every post, and your membership plugin decides whether members-only posts are listed there.