WordPress Guides Plugin

WordPress Guides

WP Guides is a WordPress plugin designed to allow for easy inclusion of documents, support materials, style guides and other types of files sometimes necessary for providing instructional materials to end users. Built almost simultaneously as its sister applications, the OR Guides and Joomla Guides, the plugin was developed with instruction resources in mind.

Why we developed WP Guides for “WordPress Guides, Documentation and Tutorials”

Like many web professionals, building and delivering a website is only the first step in the overall process in many instances. Once a project is delivered to the client it may become necessary to either support it for an extended period of time as well as teach how to use it. Nothing could be more true than delivering projects with WordPress or Joomla as both of these applications can be challenging to new inexperienced users. So after building projects for school districts and real estate offices we concluded that we need a more affordable way to distribute documents and tutorials to the client in a way that would save time and money. WP Guides was the first solution in achieving just that.

Having created custom documentation for companies in the past, I have learned that in order to produce high quality professional results, it takes 90 to 120 minutes of production for every 10 minutes of video. At $40 per hour, ever guide would cost an average of $100. This is far beyond the budget of most small web based companies and blog users so producing the tutorials early on at our expense would make the use of WP Guides an easy upsell which would be invoiced as instructional guides and support materials.

WP Guides for Third Party Developers and Designers.

It was obvious that if we make this available as a free plugin others would be inclined to use it as we hoped and distribute their own documentation to their clients in an easy to maintain format. So after hashing out many fine details we decided to make the first release of WP Guides as simple as we possibly could and leaving it largely unbranded.

Use WP Guides to distribute “CSS Style Guides”

WP guides can be used to also distribute CSS Style Guides. In our experience, nearly 50% of all projects require us to produce a well documented, easy to navigate set of guidelines for publishing content that staff members would then be required to adhere to. Each and every one of these style guides is a set of 15 to 30 + HTML pages, all of which are fully navigable from a single split menu type structure we provide to clients that opt to have such documentation included. WP Guides is an easy way to distribute Style Guides effectively.

With WP Guides you can now provide a way for the Style Guide to be available to any author or administrator right in the admin panel of WordPress which would simply open in a pre sized popup window for quick and easy reference to the style directives they would likely encounter. Style Guides solve the headaches administrators encounter by providing ways for staff members to do things consistently when publishing to the web. Centering images, making text stand out, adding captions, and inserting scalable tables are some of the more common applications. We often extend this for many clients to include the insertion of video, flash and other types of media elements.

How Can You Use WP Guides?

WP Guides as mentioned above was developed to be used in projects where we needed to distribute instructional guides, documents, tutorials, and also Style Guides for ease of management of the site. We have applied many variants of the guide to industries such as Real Estate and Automotive or even School District sites. Here is a short list on the ways you can use WP Guides.

Realtors could put their real estate documents on their site for quick and easy access from the admin panel for their agents. Each agent could log in to his or her blog (as in the case of WordPress Multi User) and download documents necessary for their trade.
Automotive dealerships will often distribute notices and other documents to its sales staff that may include promotions or other time sensitive requirements.
Web masters, designers, administrators, and developers can include WP Guides, fully unbranded, with their projects that may then include things like how to manage their site, how to publish content, how to add images or maybe flash elements. Literally dozens and dozens of web developers distribute WP Guides with their template projects where they can include documents specific to the design or theme.
Educators can provide a simple means of distributing class and or course materials as is in the case of an online school that gives students their own blog via WP MU.
Educators can provide documents to staff members where they may offer educator blogs. This is the case with the local community college wherein I setup WP MU for their faculty where we can now include updated documents, notices, updates, and other media elements based entirely on department and log in credentials ( a custom version of WP Guides )
Government agencies that pride themselves on keeping consistency in the things they publish could use WP Guides to easily distribute documents and guidelines for staffers to adhere to in the publishing of content.

WP Guides Summary of Features 2.0

Each folder is represented as a separate block in the admin panel for ease of navigation
Documents can be uploaded from within the admin panel
Supports user level access to either configuration, RSS settings and documents.
Documents, tutorials, files can be displayed or opened in a few different methods including popup pre-sized window, popup full sized window and download.
Folder names can be titled differently than their actual name for a little added security.
Document permissions can be set based on user access.
Mini Icons to help identify file type.
Opt in remote access to subscription based professional guides and tutorials.

Pending Updates in Next Release version 2.1

Control over file and folder names by admin.
Remote inclusion of guides from the perspective of web developers. This will allow for web designers and other developers to host the files on their server while still providing guides and instructional materials to all of their client base. When files update on the source they update on all linked child sites.
More to follow….

Updated Interface Screen Shots Here

Video Demonstration Here

Download WP Guides from WordPress

WordPress Guides Plugin