Licensio Knowledge Base

Licensio Knowledge Base turns WordPress into a documentation and self-service support site. It is completely standalone: it needs no other plugin, no e-commerce platform and no external service.

Articles are a post type of their own, with their own categories and tags, their own templates and their own search index. Everything a visitor does (the searches that found nothing, the articles that were read, the answers voted unhelpful) is recorded without ever storing an IP address, and reported back to you in the admin.

A knowledge base home that points the way

• A help topics page that groups every article under its category, with an article count beside each category name and a View all link into it.

• A sidebar with Popular Articles (your most viewed) and a Need Support card that leads wherever you choose, such as your contact page.

• Category pages that list every article in the category, with the full category list in the sidebar and the current one highlighted.

• Single articles with breadcrumbs, a search bar, the last-updated date, and an “On this page” table of contents built from the article’s headings.

Authoring

• A Knowledge Base post type with category and tag taxonomies.

• Category icons (inline SVG, sanitized on save, or an image), descriptions and a manual display order.

• Five dynamic blocks, each previewed in the editor by the same code that renders it on the front end.

• Knowledge Base Search block: an instant search box with keyboard-navigable suggestions.

• Knowledge Base Articles block: a list of articles, optionally filtered to one category.

• Knowledge Base Categories block: a grid of categories with their article counts.

• Knowledge Base Breadcrumbs block: the trail from the site home to the article or category being viewed.

• Knowledge Base FAQ block: articles as an expandable list of questions and answers.

• Every block is also a shortcode ( [licensio_kb_search], [licensio_kb_articles], [licensio_kb_categories], [licensio_kb_breadcrumbs], [licensio_kb_faq] ), and the sidebar is available as [licensio_kb_sidebar], so page builders and classic themes get identical markup.

Managing articles, categories and tags

• All Articles: status tabs with counts, search, and filters for category, tag, author, date, uncategorised, untagged and articles that need attention. Columns for categories, tags, attachments, helpfulness rating, views and reading time, with views and rating over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, so you can see at a glance which articles work. Quick edit inline, and bulk actions that can cover every matching article, not just one page.

• Categories: a drag-and-drop category tree with icons and images, your own article order inside each category, and delete or merge that moves the articles and subcategories where you choose.

• Tags: find unused tags, rename inline, merge tags, bulk delete them, or convert them into categories.

• Every change asks for confirmation before it is saved, and trash, status and category or tag changes can be undone for a few seconds afterwards.

• Prefer the classic WordPress screens? Turn on Classic screens under Knowledge Base > Settings > General, or return false from the licensio_kb_use_content_manager filter.

Search that finds things

• A dedicated search index, kept up to date as articles are saved, so search does not depend on WordPress’s own post search.

• MySQL FULLTEXT relevance ranking where the server supports it, with an automatic fallback that keeps working where it does not.

• Type-ahead suggestions with the matching words highlighted, from a dependency-free script with full ARIA combobox semantics and keyboard navigation.

• Every search is logged, including the ones that returned nothing: the fastest way to find the article you have not written yet.

• Rebuild the index from Knowledge Base > Tools > Search Index, or with wp licensio-kb reindex from WP-CLI.

Feedback

• “Was this helpful?” voting on every article, with a comment box after a negative vote.

• A feedback inbox for reading, filtering and triaging responses as New, Reviewed or Actioned, with bulk actions.

• A helpfulness score per article, shown in the article list and sortable.

Analytics, without tracking people

• Searches, search effectiveness, article views and empty searches, reported in a dashboard with a date-range picker and an activity chart.

• A “Questions with no answer” list of the searches that found nothing, each with a one-click link to write the missing article.

• Visitors are counted through a salted hash that rotates every day. No IP address is ever written to the database.

• Analytics can be switched off entirely. Raw events are pruned after the retention period you choose, and WordPress’s personal-data export and erase tools cover the plugin’s data.

Switching from another knowledge base

• An import wizard under Knowledge Base > Tools brings articles, categories, tags, votes, views and searches across from Heroic Knowledge Base and BetterDocs, even with the old plugin deactivated.

• Map each old category onto a new one or onto one you already have, verify everything with a dry run, then import. An interrupted import resumes where it stopped, and running it again never duplicates anything.

• Old article, category and tag URLs redirect (301) to their new addresses automatically, and the full old-to-new URL map downloads as a CSV.

• A migration log records every item: what it was, where it went, its categories, each meta field and whether it was carried over, and a plain-language reason for anything that failed.

• The old plugin’s data is only ever read, never changed, and no IP address from its analytics tables is imported.

Heroic Knowledge Base and BetterDocs are trademarks of their respective owners. Licensio Knowledge Base is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by them; the names are used only to identify the plugins the import wizard reads from.

Tools for keeping it tidy

• Duplicates: finds articles and terms that exist twice, typically after a migration, and resolves each set: one article is kept and its twins go to the trash.

• Data maintenance: recount every article’s helpfulness score from the raw votes, or delete analytics past the retention window now instead of waiting for the scheduled cleanup.

Make it look like your site

• Takes its text colour, link colour and fonts from your theme, on light and dark themes alike. Set an optional brand colour to drive links, buttons and accents; a readable text colour is picked for you.

• Choose the layout width, the card style (raised, outlined or flat), an optional archive header image, the archive heading, the search placeholder and the number of category columns.

• Put the sidebar on the left, the right or nowhere, separately for the home, categories and articles, and make it follow the reader down long articles.

• Choose your own article, category and tag URL bases, with optional nested category URLs.

Works with any theme

• Classic PHP templates for the archive, single articles, categories and tags, all overridable from your theme.

• Block templates registered with the Site Editor, which render the same knowledge base layout as the classic templates inside your block theme’s header and footer.

• Both layers fire the same hooks, so anything you attach works under either.

For developers

• More than 60 actions and filters, all prefixed licensio_.

• A REST API under licensio-kb/v1 for search, feedback, analytics and settings.

• Articles have their own capabilities, mapped like posts: authors and contributors write their own articles, and a manage_licensio_kb capability, granted to administrators and editors, controls the management screens.

• Every string is translatable under the licensio-knowledge-base text domain.

Privacy

Licensio Knowledge Base stores the following in your own database, and sends nothing anywhere else:

• Article views and searches, each with a visitor hash, the time, and (for searches) the search terms and the number of results. The visitor hash is an HMAC of the IP address and user agent with a secret salt that rotates every day, so it cannot be reversed or matched across days. The IP address itself is never stored or logged.

• Feedback votes and comments that visitors choose to leave on an article, with the same visitor hash and, for a signed-in visitor, their user ID.

Analytics can be switched off under Knowledge Base > Settings > Privacy, where you also set how long analytics are kept before they are deleted automatically. The plugin registers personal-data exporters and erasers with WordPress’s privacy tools.

The plugin sets no cookies of its own and loads no third-party scripts, fonts or images.

External services

This plugin does not connect to any external service. Search, analytics and every admin screen run entirely on your own server, and all scripts and styles ship inside the plugin.

Source code and build tools

The admin screens and the editor blocks are compiled. org SVN repository and on GitHub:

• SVN trunk: https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/licensio-knowledge-base/trunk/

• GitHub: https://github.com/mahlamusa/licensio-knowledge-base

• apps/: the Vue 3 admin applications (articles, categories, tags, settings, analytics, feedback and tools).

• blocks/: the editor blocks.

• package.json, package-lock.json, vite.config.mjs and tools/build-apps.mjs / tools/build-blocks.mjs: the build configuration.

• tsconfig.json and eslint.config.mjs: the type check and lint configuration, for npm run typecheck and npm run lint:js.

js 22 or later, then run npm ci followed by npm run build in the plugin folder.

The admin applications are built with Vite and the blocks with @wordpress/scripts. Everything in assets/, includes/ and templates/ ships uncompiled.

Third-party libraries

Bundled into the compiled admin applications in dist/:

• Vue 3.5.44, MIT License, https://github.com/vuejs/core

• Pinia 4.1.0, MIT License, https://github.com/vuejs/pinia

• Ant Design Vue 4.2.6, MIT License, https://github.com/vueComponent/ant-design-vue

• Chart.js 4.6.1, MIT License, https://github.com/chartjs/Chart.js

json.

Included as PHP source in libraries/:

• StellarWP DB 1.3.1, GPL-2.0, https://github.com/stellarwp/db. The classes are prefixed with Licensio_KB\ using Strauss so they cannot collide with another plugin’s copy.