Luke Moulton

Using WordPress, ScreenSteps and Thesis to create a work wiki or documentation platform

After looking around for a suitable wiki to assist with publish lessons and guides for my virtual assistants, I finally decided to go back to my tried and true friend, WordPress. There are plenty of paid services out there, but I’m spending enough as it is on hosted software solutions (SaaS), besides, WordPress is such as flexible platform, why wouldn’t it make a good documentation or wiki engine.

WordPress isn’t the only hero though, the super-hero sidekick in this story is the awesome documentation tool call ScreenSteps.

ScreenSteps for Document Authoring

ScreenSteps makes creating screenshot style documentation dead easy. It’s a Windows/Mac compatible desktop app that lets you quickly author documentation – take screenshots and add text instruction. ScreenStep’s most powerful feature (IMO) is it’s export options. In addition to the usual suspects, MS Word, PDF and HTML, there’s the ability to export directly to a self hosted WordPress website via the Blog/Web Export option. Lovely.

First Things First: Hosting

If you don’t already have some spare website hosting sitting around, then I recommend Hostgator. Hosting starts from around $4 per month and you can literally have a WordPress installation setup in minutes once your hosting account has been setup. Here’s a quick step by step guide to setting up WordPress.

Once your hosting account’s setup and you’ve installed WordPress, you can install a WordPress wiki style theme in the next step.

Thesis Theme for a Clean Interface

To keep things nice and clean and to focus on the documentation instead of the interface, I use the Thesis WordPress Theme (aff). It’s probably overkill as Thesis’ power is in it’s out of the box search engine friendliness (on page SEO), but I just love the very clean simple look of Thesis, it seems appropriate for a WordPress wiki theme. If you’re not showing your documentation to the world, then use whatever theme you like – you could even use the default WordPress 3.x theme, Twenty Ten.

There is a cost to Thesis, but it is known as one of the best WordPress themes on the market, and very widely used, so should it not work out for you on this project, you can use it for another WordPress project. (I purchased the development version and use Thesis for many of my WordPress sites).

You can download Thesis here.

Plugins for Extra Functionality

Here are the additional plugins I installed for a little extra functionality:

• Members Only
  To keep my documentation private, I added the Members Only plugin.  This means that whenever someone visits your documentation site, they are prompted with the WordPress Admin login page, so only registered users can access the content. For greater flexibility, you could use something like Wishlist Member to give different people access to different posts.
• Table of Content Creator
  This awesome plugin let’s you create a table of content with one small tag. I used it to add a TOC to the home page.
• Yoast Breadcrumbs
  Just to make navigation a little easier, I added Yoast’s cool little breadcrumb plugin. This works out of the box with Thesis.
• Others
  As you can see above, I numbered by categories and posts which made ordering them easy. If you don’t want to number yours, but still want to have some sort of order for others to follow, then try PostMash and My Category Order.

Documentation Best Practice

Now, I’m no documentation guru – I know this isn’t necessarily best practice for producing documentation, but it suits my process and seems to work well as a wiki for small teams. My team can comment on documentation I’ve added and even make changes and improvements themselves.

DocBook is the industry standard for creating and publishing documentation and is a very powerful XML schema, but I’m yet to find a simple solution for creating and publishing DocBooks documentation. The tools outlined above may take a little bit of time to setup but this system is relatively cheap and uses tools I (and my virtual assistants) are familiar with.

So there you have it:

WordPress + Thesis + ScreenSteps = Work Wiki.