WP Screen Help Loader

Make your site’s on-screen admin help tabs more helpful by adding custom help tabs or additional sidebar content to any screen of the WordPress Admin Dashboard’s built-in “Help” menu simply by placing help files in a special folder.

This plugin looks for files located in your current theme’s admin-help/ folder and, based on their name, adds their content to the WordPress on-screen help menuing system. The files should be written in markdown.

You can augment any screen’s help tabs or help sidebar, including screens created by other plugins. The name of the help file determines which screen in the WordPress admin area the file’s content will be added to.

You can add help content in any language, and the plugin will automatically load the correct language file for your site. This makes translating help content easy.

For instance, if you run an English website and want to augment the built-in help provided by WordPress core or a custom plugin shown on the user’s profile editing page, add a file at YOUR_THEME/admin-help/en_US/profile.md, where YOUR_THEME is the theme folder. (For a Spanish site, add a file to YOUR_THEME/admin-help/es_ES/profile.md.)

The rules used by the plugin to determine which file to load on which screen are as follows:

• Each help file is contained within a directory matching the locale string of the WordPress installation. Control the locale string by changing the WordPress language setting.
• File names reference the $action and $id members of the WP_Screen class.
• Files can be optionally suffixed with a numeric priority (lower numbers display first, above the content of files with larger numbers as per WP_Screen documentation).
• Files can be optionally prefixed with sidebar- indicating that the file contains content intended for the help sidebar rather than a tab of its own.
• The special filename sidebar.md is appended to the sidebar on every WordPress admin screen page where on-screen help is shown.

For plugin or theme authors

To use WP Screen Help Loader in your plugin, all you need to do is:

function my_plugin_add_custom_help () {
    new WP_Screen_Help_Loader(plugin_dir_path(__FILE__) . 'help');
}
add_action('admin_head', 'my_plugin_add_custom_help');

Now put your localized help contents into the help/YOUR_LANGUAGE directory in your plugin directory. That’s it!
If you like this plugin, please consider making a donation for your use of the plugin, purchasing one of Meitar’s web development books or, better yet, contributing directly to Meitar’s Cyberbusking fund. (Publishing royalties ain’t exactly the lucrative income it used to be, y’know?) Your support is appreciated!