Once you install WP Knowledgebase, you need to take a few steps to make sure your knowledge base is working the way you want it to. This article will cover these very steps, so let’s dive in.
Creating your knowledge base’s main page
After you activate the plugin for the very first time, you’ll be welcomed with an admin notification asking if you’d like the plugin to create the knowledge base’s main page. Here’s how it looks:
If you click the Create page button, the plugin will create a new page for you, named Knowledgebase. This page’s content will only contain the [kbe_knowledgebase] shortcode.
Please note: to have the plugin working properly, this page is mandatory.
If you wish to have full control over the creation of this page and choose to manually add it, please follow these steps:
- Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard > Pages > Add New.
- Here, set the page’s title and slug. We suggest going with something simple, for example Knowledgebase for the title and knowledgebase for the slug, or Documentation for the title and documentation for the slug. Or why not KB and kb, or Docs and docs.
- Add the [kbe_knowledgebase] as the content of the page, either writing it directly (in the Classic Editor) or adding a shortcode block for it (in the Gutenberg Editor).
- Navigate to Knowledgebase > Settings and select this newly created page in the General Settings (section) > Knowledgebase Main Page field.
Setting your knowledge base’s slugs
WP Knowldgebase uses WordPress’ custom post types and taxonomies to manage content. If you’re not familiar with these terms, the important thing to know is that the plugin uses the same mechanisms WordPress uses for posts and pages.
By default, to make sure the plugin doesn’t break your website by overwriting anything from other plugins, the custom post type is named kbe_knowledgebase, while the category taxonomy is named kbe_taxonomy. As you can notice, not very appealing.
Luckily, with WP Knowledgebase you can overwrite these values with something human friendly. To do it:
- Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard > Knowledgebase > Settings > General Settings (tab).
- Set the Knowledgebase Slug option to something like knowledgebase or documentation. Our recommendation with this is to have the main page’s slug (the one set in the previous section) match this value. For example, if your knowledge base’s main page title is Documentation, with the slug documentation, the value for the Knowldegase Slug is recommended to be documentation.
- Set the Knowledgebase Category Slug to something like knowledgebase-category or documentation-category. This will turn your knowledge base’s category URL into something like this: https://yourwebsite.com/knowledgebase-category/slug-of-category. However, if you’d like your URL to be more sectioned, you can set the category slug to something similar to documentation/category, matching the string before the slash to the knowledge base’s slug, the one set above. This will turn you category URL into something like this: htts://yourwebsite.com/documentation/category/slug-of-category.
Creating your first category and article
Now that the basics are set up, you can go ahead and add your first bits of content for your users.
In the next article, we’ll cover categories and articles. Click here to jump right to it.