Getting Started
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This guide is designed to help you set up your first documentation articles using QuickDocs. If you want some indication of how your finished product will look for your end user then look no further; the article you’re reading was created using QuickDocs!
This guide covers how to use QuickDocs after you’ve installed it. If you’re not sure how to setup the QuickDocs WordPress plugin on your set then follow our Installation Guide and then come back.
Creating your First Documentation Article
When you’ve activated QuickDocs you’ll see a new item in menu of your WordPress admin dashboard labelled Documentation. If you can’t see this menu item it may be because your account doesn’t have the permissions to create or edit posts.
This is the hub for everything you’ll do with QuickDocs. Here you can see all your articles, create new articles, manage your article topics (like categories for articles) and your global QuickDocs settings. Before we get into anything else, lets create your first article.
Head to Documentation > Add Article in your dashboard. Writing your articles should be a familiar experience since QuickDocs uses the built-in WordPress editor. Depending on your theme/plugins this may be the Gutenberg block editor or the classic editor. Write your content as you would normally and hit publish. Your first documentation article is live!
There are a couple of new settings here to play that we’ll go through in a moment like Article State & Sidebar Menu.
If you view your article you’ll see the default QuickDocs template. If you have any headings on your page you’ll see a table of contents to navigate between them. In your footer you’ll find a way to mark if a page was helpful or not and when it was last updated.
If you’re not seeing the QuickDocs template, a theme or plugin may be interfering with the template hook in WordPress. Try deactivating all your plugins and then reactivating them one by one to determine which is causing the issue. Feel free to contact our plugin support team to help you resolve this conflict.
Setting up your Sidebar Menu
Now let’s start organising the structure of your docs. We’ll do this using WordPress’ build in Menus system. Head back to your admin dashboard and go to Appearance > Menus. Depending on your version of WordPress and if you’re using a Block Theme this may be in a different place, visit WordPress’ support guide for finding this page if you’re having issues.
Here you can create menus as you usually do. We recommend only including documentation articles in your menus so users aren’t confused when they navigate to a page. Your sidebar menu will only be visible on documentation articles, not your entire site.
When creating your menu, make sure to set it’s display location to the Default Documentation Sidebar. This will be the sidebar menu used by default in QuickDocs but we can override this by topic or by article.
Understanding Sidebar Inheritance
The sidebar menu in QuickDocs is inherited by default. That means that if an article doesn’t have a sidebar menu chosen for it, it will try to use it’s parent article’s. If there isn’t one chosen there it’ll try it’s parent and so on. Then it’ll try to use the sidebar menu chosen for the topic (like a category) that the article is in. If all else fails it’ll use the sidebar menu set to the Default Documentation Sidebar display location.
When managing topics you can set what menu that articles set to this topic should use. If you need to get very granular you can set this when editing an individual article and this can trickle down to any child articles.
If you’d like a more in-depth explanation of how sidebars are managed and how they inherit through docs then visit our full sidebar menu documentation page.
View your Article
If you head back to Documentation > All Articles in your dashboard you’ll be able to hover over your new article and click view. You should now be able to see the sidebar you created on the left hand side.
The final step is to add a link from your main site to your documentation so users can find it. This will vary by theme but by default your Documentation homepage will be available at www.yourwebsite.com/docs or you can find the URL by going to Documentation > All Articles and clicking View Articles in the top bar.
For the rest of this guide we’ll go over to other pages in the QuickDocs area of your dashboard so you can get an idea of what each section does.
Managing Topics
You can group your article together by topics, similar to categories for posts. This can be useful to set a group of articles to use a different menu to the rest of your documentation or to organise articles into a single archive page.
You can manage topics by heading to Documentation > Topics in your admin dashboard and then make new topics/edit existing topics the same way you’d managed categories.
We won’t go into too much detail here but you can learn more about organising docs with topics by heading to our full topics documentation page.
Editing your QuickDocs Settings
Out of the box QuickDocs tries to create a modern, beautiful documentation. If you want to get a more custom look to suite your site you can make design adjustments across all QuickDocs pages by heading to Documentation > Settings in the admin dashboard and choosing the Design tab. Here you can choose the font, colour scheme and other aesthetic settings for your articles. If you’d like to learn more you can read our article on Customising QuickDocs.
If you want to adjust the content on your documentation home page, head to the Home tab and peruse the settings there. By default your documentation home page will be available at www.yourwebsite.com/docs. For more info visit our full guide on the Managing Documentation Archives.
From this page you can also import existing articles in the markdown, plaintext or HTML formats. To find out how, visit our Importing Articles in QuickDocs page.