Heroic Knowledge Base Plugin Review: Build a Knowledge Base Website with WordPress
If you want to create a helpful resource for your readers, you can add a knowledge base to your website.
A successfully implemented and managed knowledge base can reduce support costs and empower your customers and clients to help themselves. Creating an active and regularly updated online knowledge base can also give your target audience a reason to keep returning to your website. This lets you inform them of your latest products and services.
Suppose the idea of creating an online knowledge base to support your customers and community, while also reducing the time and money you spend on support sounds appealing. In that case, this review and guide to using the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin is essential reading.
Heroic Knowledge Base Plugin: Features
The Heroic Knowledge Base plugin has been built to work alongside any WordPress theme. This is great as it allows you to either build a dedicated knowledge base website or add this feature to your existing WordPress website.
Before we look at the key features in detail, some of the highlights of this WordPress knowledge base plugin include AJAX-powered live search, dedicated post type for storing articles, article taxonomies for organizing your content, related article links, breadcrumb navigation, and article voting.
The plugin also includes a selection of widgets that can be added to your sidebar and the other widgetized areas of your website. Also, if your chosen WordPress theme is mobile-responsive, then all the knowledge base articles will also be easily accessible on a small screen device.
Once the plugin has been activated on your site, it adds a new custom post type to WordPress. This helps keep all your knowledge base content separate from your regular blogs posts and pages. This then makes it easier for you to manage this content, while also making it easier for your visitors to find what they are a looking for.
As well segmenting your content, this support plugin includes a live search feature to help your visitors find what they are looking for, as quickly as possible. Live search means that when a user starts typing in their query, the search area begins to display matching entries from the knowledge base. Not only does this instant feedback save the user time, but it also allows them to refine their query to find the best results.
Search auto-complete is a key feature of the Google search engine, and now it’s something you can use on your website too.
Another optional feature of Heroic Knowledge Base that you may want to use, is the voting system. While most of the core features of this plugin can be enabled or disabled through the settings, the voting feature is available as a separate plugin file – although it is included in the price of the plugin.
After activating the voting add-on, you can then choose whether to allow non-logged in visitors to vote or not. Now the rating buttons will be shown after each article in the knowledge base, complete with current number of votes.
As well as using custom post types to store your knowledge base articles, this plugin also gives you custom taxonomies to organize your knowledge base content. These custom taxonomies work in the same way as regular WordPress categories and tags. However, they are only available to your knowledge base content. This gives you and your visitors another effective way of finding content that is related to the article they are currently reading.
In addition to the article categories, tags, and powerful search tool, the related articles feature is another way that you can make it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for. At the end of each article, the plugin will determine which other articles are related, and display them as clickable links.
If you’ve enabled this setting, the number of votes an article has received will be displayed, along with the article title.
The Heroic Knowledge Base plugin includes a number of widgets. These widgets can be added to the sidebar, or other widgetized areas of your website. The three widgets cover: displaying knowledge base articles, displaying authors, and categories.
Each of the widgets can be configured to work in the way you want. Then when they are saved, they give your visitors another way to find more of the articles in your knowledge base.
Heroic Knowledge Base is highly configurable. The plugin settings allow you to disable or enable many of the above features. This gives you lots of flexibility to determine how the knowledge base on your website works.
You can also export and import the plugin settings. This gives you the ability to quickly deploy your preferred settings, this would come in very handy if you are setting up multiple WordPress websites with a knowledge base. This is in addition to being a quick and easy way to back up your settings.
If you are not entirely familiar with the concept of an online knowledge base, you can check out the demo website that has been built with this plugin.
Heroic Knowledge Base Review: User Experience
Getting started with this Heroic Knowledge Base is very straightforward. Simply upload the plugin file to your website like a regular plugin, and then activate it.
After activating the plugin, the Heroic Knowledge Base welcome page is displayed. Through the welcome page, you are offered the option of installing sample data, to populate your website with demo knowledge base content. If you are testing out the plugin on a development installation of WordPress, this is a good idea, as it will give you a hands on demo of the software to experiment with.
Whether you install the sample data or not, it’s a good idea to take some time to explore the settings for the plugin. As you can see, the user interface for managing the plugin settings is nicely designed.
Through the control panel, you get a good amount of control over how the support section of your website functions. However, the plugin’s default settings should be perfect for almost everyone. This allows you to get started as quickly as possible.
The only setting you might want to change is whether you are creating a knowledge base website, or adding the knowledge base features to an existing website. If the support articles are to be the main feature of the website, then you can choose to set the knowledge base as the homepage of your website.
When it comes to managing your knowledge base articles, and adding new content, you can easily do so from the back end of your WordPress website.
As each article is created and stored as WordPress custom post types, they can be edited using the familiar post editor. This also gives you the ability to easily format the article content, add images, and do anything else with a regular WordPress blog post.
Depending on how you’ve configured the website, the main area of the knowledge base will either be displayed on the homepage of your website, or on an internal page.
Your visitors can then click through to the individual articles to view them. Depending on how you’ve set up the plugin, related articles are displayed at the end of each post.
That about covers setting up and using the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin. All that’s left is to add the support articles to your website.
Pricing
If you want to add a knowledge base to your website, or build an entire knowledge base website, then this premium plugin can be yours for $129.
This price includes one year of product updates and access to user support. After the year is up, the license can be renewed at a discounted rate. The plugin has a 60-day money back guarantee, allowing you to try it without any financial risk.
You can view the full pricing details here.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Adding a knowledge base to your website is not just for software or service providers. Suppose you ever receive common questions from your visitors. In that case, using the features of this plugin to publicly answer those queries on your website, gives you the ability to provide a useful resource to future visitors.
Publishing this content online saves you time and can help better educate your visitors and hopefully help them make a positive decision regarding your offering.
As Heroic Knowledge Base is easy to use – both in terms of administrating and as an end user – it’s a great choice for anyone who wants to add helpful content to their WordPress website.
Find out more about Heroic Knowledge Base for WordPress today
I hope this article helped you to understand more about the Heroic KB plugin. Additionally, you might want to check out knowledge base WordPress themes powered by Heroic plugin.
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Great review! Also a great plugin but very expensive (125 USD) and 50% yearly renewal for support and updates. We’re using a lot of populair themes and we always had to made extensive CSS modifications (Enfold, Avada and Betheme). If you buy the plugin with one of the support themes from Heroic on themeforest, you’ll get the plugin with theme for 1/3 of that price.
Conclusion: great plugin if you look at functionality. It works almost with every theme, but don’t look at the styling in that case. For 125 USD this is simply too expensive.
Ferry,
Thank you for your feedback!
This is a brand new release as a separate premium plugin, so will see how well this pricing policy will work for them. Other than that it is an awesome plugin and the best one I have seen in this category so far.
I just stumbled across your review and agree with Ferry above.
The plugin appears to be great functionality wise, however it’s not so great price wise. I’m not to thrilled at their pricing range when, like Ferry mentioned, you can buy one of their themes and it’s pre-bundled.
I’d rather spend $59 instead of $129 to get the theme included; which is exactly what I did. I can now install the plugin (which was the only part that I wanted) and potentially use the theme at a later date.
I’d also like to note that if you use the version that comes pre-bundled and try to use it with another theme that uses the Redux Framework (which the plugin is using) your theme options disappear from the admin side; citing an error for a file in the plugin that doesn’t exist.
The author won’t support debugging the error as they don’t want users utilizing that version of the plugin without their theme. If your theme of choice doesn’t run on Redux then it looks like you won’t have any problems.
Completely agree with Ferry, the guys at HeroThemes are very good, but this plugin for USD 125 is just too expensive.
Their actual pricing model is:
Basic: USD 129 (1 Site, 1 year of support and updates).
Professional: USD 159. (3 Sites, 1 year of support and updates).
Business: USD 399 (10 sites, 1 year of support and updates).
When it should look way more friendly in my opinion, something like:
Basic: USD 60 (1 Site, 1 year of support and updates).
Professional: USD 90. (5 Sites, 1 year of support and updates).
Business: USD 150 (Unlimited sites, Lifetime upgrades and 1 year of support).
Then they can offer annual support & upgrades packages for the 20% of the price of the subscription but optional.
I hope they realize that otherwise its too expensive. I paid USD 249 for a lifetime subscription of Elegant Themes. I pay USD 199 for wpmudev.org with tons of themes and plugins.