In this round-up, we’re taking a look at the best wiki and knowledge base themes available for WordPress in 2020. Several have been developed with support desks and help desks in mind.
The must-have features are pretty straight forward. You need to be able to build a collection of articles, organize them in a sensible way, and search and navigate those articles easily. Every theme on this list satisfies those requirements. Live AJAX searching, which will eliminate page reloads and improve user experience, is not necessary but certainly desirable. If you’re planning on building a help or support desk, bbPress integration will be essential for interacting with your customers and site visitors.
As always, we picked out these themes by hand, based on the quality of the design and the depth of functionality. Though we often try to list the themes in a meaningful order, many of those we turned up this time around are very close in terms of design and features.
Helper
This clean, light-weight helpdesk & knowledgebase theme earns a top-spot on our list for its combination of awesome, content-focused design and excellent user-experience. It maintains a unique character while embracing contemporary, minimalistic design trends — a feat that takes more skill to pull off that you might expect, and is often taken for granted — and the designers have successfully managed to avoid the many trappings of generic ‘premium theme’ design and aesthetic.
Performance is snappy and responsive, an occasionally overlooked necessity for a quality UX, and all the must have features are included for building a fully functional helpdesk or knowledge base. Useful secondary features include bbPress integration, Visual Composer (bundled free), and an option panel put together with the popular Redux framework. There’s a lot of room for adjustments & tweaks that will come in handy when branding your site and making this theme your own.
As you’d expect from any modern theme, Helper is fully responsive and will scale to look and work great across the gamut of mobile devices. The theme is translation ready, and demo data is bundled for a fast & easy setup.
More Info/DownloadLive Support
Released in April, Live Support is a helpdesk/customer support theme that aims for simplicity and usability and hits the mark without sacrificing on features or design. The larger, modern typography and flat aesthetic also helps make this knowledge base theme standout when it comes to the user experience on smartphones and tablets. It’s fast, easy to navigate, and the extra-large search form is front-and-center.
If you’re not feeling the homepage layout on the demo, three others are included, and the options panel gives you a bit more control over the bits & pieces. It’s more streamlined than some of the themes you’ll find in list roundup. That’s going to appeal to some, though others may be looking for something ‘bigger’. To build an efficient, bloat-free product, you always have to sacrifice some flexability.
Live Support’s integration with the popular BuddyPress plugin is flawless, and it also supports Contact Form 7 and WPML (for translation). The theme is retina-ready, so it’s going to look crisp on that brand new MacBook Pro, and it’s built on Twitter’s responsive Bootstrap 3 framework.
Easy to install, with demo XML content provided. Six months of support is included, and buyers can opt to extend that to twelve months for a small extra fee.
More Info/Download
HelpGuru
HelpGuru is the latest theme release by ChrisMooney, the developer of two other knowledge base themes making an appearance on this list. HelpGuru is the most advanced yet, powered by a bundled knowledge base plugin.
There’s lots of features here. Content can be easily organized using a drag & drop system. Visitors can rate articles, giving you feedback on what content your users are finding the most useful (or the least useful). Adding attachments and downloadable files to the articles is a breeze, and the live AJAX search feature improves the user experience by eliminating unnecessary page loads.
Three custom widgets are included, and the theme can be customized using the extensive admin panel. HelpGuru supports bbPress, and is SEO optimized out-of-the-box.
More Info/DownloadGuru
The snappy, user-friendly Guru theme brings minimalistic design and killer UX together in one package. The straight-forward knowledge base implementation is a breeze to install and set up (in part thanks to the included XML demo data), and includes full support for WordPress’s popular bbPress forum plugin.
Visual Composer is provided free, adding advanced page building functionality. Users can (almost) effortlessly create and edit layouts without touching a line of code.
Tweak, brand and customize the theme using an extensive options panel based on the powerful Redux Framework. Change colors, adjust fonts, upload logos & favicons and more. Guru is responsive, translation-ready, and includes a variety of useful shortcodes and a built-in contact form.
More Info/DownloadHeroic Knowledge Base/KnowAll/InstaAnswer FAQ
KnowAll and InstaAnswer FAQ, from HeroThemes, are powered by the developer’s very own proprietary WordPress knowledge base plugin, Heroic. The team specializes in knowledge base functionality and solutions, giving the KnowAll theme and the InstaAnswer FAQ theme an edge over the competitors: this is serious product. Although that comes at a slightly higher price tag, along with the powerful features and modern design and UX, you also get peace of mind–this is a product that is regularly updated, expertly maintained and enthusiastically supported, and with nearly 7000 active clients, will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Usability features like AJAX searching (instant answers), custom widgets, and user feedback are expertly integrated to provide a superior front-end user experience, and superior admin features like drag & drop content ordering and analytics help webmasters to effortless manage things on the back-end.
The plugin itself will work with any properly designed WordPress theme but, as you’d expect, the best experience comes with either of HeroThemes two custom themes. Both are pixel-perfect, clean-cut designs that prioritize UX and performance. The themes/plugin are fully optimized for mobile devices, and translation-ready with WPML support. Highly recommended.
More Info/DownloadSentric
The clean, minimalistic design of the Sentric theme is one of its best features, providing a fast, responsive, and enjoyable user experience for site visitors and site administrators alike.
The simple, intuitive implementation of its knowledgebase and Q&A features are one of it strongest selling points (and accomplished largely via custom post types). Forum use the popular and powerful bbPress plugin.
Notable secondary features include a variety of useful widgets, shortcodes, and support for each of WordPress’s post formats. Sentric is SEO optimized and translation ready.
More Info/DownloadSupportDesk
The clean, minimalistic and professional design of Support Desk earns it a spot near the top of our list. With Support Desk, you can build a fully functional knowledge base.
The features are similar those of the HelpGuru theme. Live search is a particularly notable feature that ensures your users and customers get answers fast. The theme is integrated with bbPress, so building community forums is a snap.
Three custom widgets and a selection of useful shortcodes are bundled in. Support Desk is fully responsive, has SEO built-in, and provides an excellent options panel for customizing the frontend appearance of the theme.
More Info/DownloadFlatbase
The Flatbase knowledge base/wiki theme works equally well as a support desk theme. The design is clean, classy and contemporary, and Flatbase is fully responsive and retina-ready. This theme will look just as good on your iPhone as it will on your iMac. Or just as good on your Samsung Galaxy as it will on your ASUS desktop. We don’t want to make any assumptions.
An AJAX search is built-in, to ensure a pleasing user experience, and bbPress is integrated so that you can interact with your customers and provide support.
The code is clean and SEO optimized. Site admins can take advantage of the intuitive options panel to tweak the appearance and features on the backend. Flatbase has a variety of custom widgets bundled, and is translation ready.
More Info/DownloadKnowledgePress
KnowledgePress is a responsive knowledge base theme that makes it easy to build a robust, professional support desk for your customers and site visitors. It’s one of the best-selling themes of it’s type on ThemeForest, and has a star rating of over 4.5. A high star rating suggests above average usability and a fast, helpful support team.
In terms of features, KnowledgePress brings live searching to the table, and the theme is bundled with a frontend drag and drop page builder so you can make quick and easy adjustments to layout and appearance.
The theme is translation ready, and a straight-forward options panel is available on the backend (you can demo this from the product page). A long list of miscellaneous extras like Analytics integration, social icons, Google fonts and shortcodes make KnowledgePress a good value.
More Info/DownloadKnowledgeBase
Part of the strength of the KnowledgeBase theme is in its modern, elegant design. Perfect for building wiki and knowledge base websites, the theme is responsive, built on Twitter’s popular Bootstrap framework, and optimized for SEO out-of-the-box.
Support forums are made possible thanks to careful integration with the bbPress plugin, and a live AJAX search means your customers can get answers to their inquiries quickly and painlessly.
There’s four preset skins included, and three different homepage templates to choose from. Six custom widgets are packed in, and admins have full contol over text and background colors in the theme options panel.
More Info/DownloadAltera Knowledge Base Theme
The clean, bold design of Altera theme is the tip of the iceberg: there’s a ton of features and options here, including live search, 15 widgetized areas, 10 custom widgets, a FAQ post format, bbPress integration and more.
It’s highly customizable, thanks to a Redux-based options panel that provides control over pretty much any element of the theme, and thanks to the included Visual Composer page building plugin. Access to 500+ Google fonts gives you lots of typographic options.
The Altera knowledge base theme is fast, SEO ready, translatable and supports right-to-left languages.
More Info/Download
KnowHow
The responsive wiki theme KnowHow strips away the fat and leaves you with the bare essentials.
KnowHow is one of the first knowledge base themes to feature a live search, a feature that’s been adopted by many other themes since. KnowHow includes a FAQ page, is WPML compatible, and has excellent SEO built right in.
Though minimalistic to begin with, users can still tweak the frontend and choose a custom color scheme via color picker.
More Info/DownloadiKnowledge
Next on our list is iKnowledge, a sleek, pixel-perfect theme developed by ThemeWarriors. iKnowledge is responsive, and comes with a number of nice features, like a ratings system and a useful options panel for customization.
9 custom widgets are included, as well as a selection of handy shortcodes. The theme also has advanced SEO options built-in, eliminating the need to install an extraneous third-party plugin.
More Info/DownloadAnd that concludes our foray into the best WordPress wiki and knowledge base themes. Join us again next time, when we’ll be presenting a different collection of WordPress themes.
Helpful collection thanks. Although afters spending a some time checking them out, it’s still not clear how customisable the user rights are and if they’re more private knowledge base or open wiki. I suppose there are plenty of user role plugins to achieve the same thing but it would be nice to know if it’s baked in considering the niche use and relatively limited selection available.
p.s. Atom is no longer available at source link