Nick Hamze

During Christmas break I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve always wanted to make a plugin but I usually get discouraged because whenever I check out the plugin repo I see that someone has already made one similar to my idea. However, I think I finally thought of something that no one has done yet, which might mean it’s a stupid idea .

I want to create a plugin called Quick Help. It would basically be a dashboard widget that you can use to answer some of your simple WordPress questions. I’ve noticed that a lot of the time when a user asks a question it is not necessarily how to do something but rather where to find the setting. For example, take the question “how do I change my title”. The “Site Title” setting is pretty self explainatory but most people who ask this question don’t know to look on the general settings screen, but once they get there they are all set.

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This plugin will be basically be a dashboard widget with a search field. When you enter in your question the widget gives you the link to the screen where you can find that setting. So if someone typed in “How do I limit by the number of the posts on the front page?” the plugin would spit out a link that would send them to the Settings –> Reading screen. All this plugin would do is point you to the right screen. There are already many resources that point you to external resources but I didn’t find many that just point you to the correct screen of your WordPress site.

Maybe its a dumb idea but I think this could be useful in some situations. Hopefully I will get around to trying to develop this plugin in the future.