Set up the help center

The help center runs inside your WordPress site, on your domain, with your SSL and login. Most settings are in Settings → Help center. People with Manage the help center (admins by default) can change them.

Web address

Web address sets where the help center lives, for example help for example.com/help/. When you change it, the last five old addresses keep working: they redirect to the same page at the new address.

To add help search to any page, use the Help search block or the [cliedesk_help_search] shortcode.

One help center serves every product. A help center per product, at example.com/help/product-slug/ with its own categories and search, is available with Cliedesk Pro.

Pages and theme

The home, category and article pages are block templates. Edit them in the Site Editor; they use your theme’s header and footer. Classic themes get the same content between their header and footer. A child theme can override templates/help.php. Help center styles and scripts load only on help center pages.

Look

In Look, set the Title, Logo address, Accent colour, Colours (Like the theme, Light, Dark or Automatic, which follows the visitor’s device), Category columns and Category cards (Filled, Outlined or Plain). Empty fields follow your theme. Cliedesk adjusts the accent colour until text on it is easy to read.

There is no box for custom code. Add custom CSS, scripts or analytics through your theme, the Customizer or an analytics plugin. Developers can use the actions cliedesk_help_before_content and cliedesk_help_after_content, the filter cliedesk_help_template_markup and the body classes cliedesk-help and cliedesk-help-{kind}. Theme CSS always wins over Cliedesk’s CSS.

Who can open it

The help center is open to everyone. A private help center (signed-in visitors, some roles or a shared password) is available with Cliedesk Pro.

Search engines

If Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress or AIOSEO is active, it handles meta tags and schema. Without one, Cliedesk adds a description, Open Graph tags, canonical links, Article and breadcrumb schema, and links between translations. Set Search engine description and Hide from search engines per article in the editor sidebar. Articles that are not for everyone (internal articles) and search results are never indexed or in the sitemap.

Redirects

When you change an article’s address, the old one redirects by itself. For other old addresses, use Redirects: one per line, the old address, a space, then the new one, for example /faq/returns /help/returns/. Up to 500 lines, on this site only. A missing page under the help center shows search results for the words in the address and your contact options.

Comments

Turn on Let visitors comment on articles and get emails when an article changes. It is off by default. WordPress moderation and Akismet apply. A commenter can tick Email me when this article is updated. When the title or text changes, each subscriber gets one email with a link to unsubscribe.

Show articles on other pages

Use the Help article block or [cliedesk_article id="12"] (add title="no" to hide the title). Only visitors who may read the article see it. With Cliedesk Pro, a private help center (signed-in only, some roles or a password) also hides these embeds from visitors who may not enter it. Other WordPress sites can embed public articles as a card.

For developers: JavaScript

On help pages and wherever help search shows, window.cliedesk.help offers search(q), open(id) and suggest(ids). search gives the same results the visitor would see and fires cliedesk:help:searched. suggest fires cliedesk:help:suggested.

See also Help center articles and the Settings reference.