I’ve made many changes to my workflow in the last few months and this has allowed me to produce more content than ever before be it blogs posts, videos, code snippets or full blown plugins.
The introduction of ChatGPT to add my comments, to produce auto change logs & to write documentation have all helped with this but one thing has still been alluding me organised documentation on Reallyusefulplugins and changelogs.
To launch I used better docs but just didn’t like the way it works or the way in which it produced documentation as i added it wasn’t quite what I wanted but it did what I initially needed and that was to get the documentation out and on the site.
So fast forward to this week, I have some annual leave and wanted to sort this problem out and I have been working on it this week.
Documentation / Knowledge Base:
So i wanted to keep this in WordPress but I tried several documentation providers and couldn’t get one that I liked so here I was about to settle on Gitbook when I saw a Reddit post talking about SAAS providers and found a link to an old AppSumo deal for https://eniston.io/ and I thought I would give this one a try.
Well within one additional €12 payment including VAT i was able to remove the branding on my workplaces and begin working on docs.reallyusefulplugins.com and it was dead easy to add the custom CNAME using Cloudflare.
I had a working site within about 90 minutes and within 4 hours I had populated all 8 plugins and added the additional documents, I am pleased with the speed and the setup and there was plenty of options for adding additional setup and options
For now I am happy with this I have since learned that the provider of the next plugin discussed in this article has a WordPress based knowledge base plugin and I plan on giving this a whirl at some point but it wont be for a while if I migrate at all for now I am happy with https://eniston.io/
Change Logs
As well as a new doc centre and knowledge base I wanted to begin publishing change logs, i’ve been really active and think its nice to see them added and to keep some idea of the changes I have made for my users.
The creators of https://eniston.io/ have two potential products and I have explored them both a little featureshit and https://releasesapp.com/. I had a play with both and quite liked releasapp and if i had a SAAS product rather than volumes of WordPress releases and snippets I probably would have settled for that but given it comes with only 3 spaces and I have to buy each one individually it just wasn’t going to work long-term.
I then looked through the WordPress repo and code canyon and checked out a few products but couldn’t settle on one until i found changelogger the way this particular plugin works is actually really clever its a block that accepts my text files and produces the page for you, automatically based on the tags in the readme file.
So as an example the text file below would become a wonderfully visual changelog.
= 1.12 (03 March 2025) =
Tweaked: Moved Dashboard Tabs Manager menu to Settings > SC Dashboard Tabs.
Fixed: Resolved issue with the "Select Image" button not functioning.
= 1.11 (28 February 2025) =
New: Added dynamic post type selector allowing users to choose from all registered public post types.
Improvement: Enhanced content source field behavior so that the Post Type column remains in place (even when hidden) to avoid layout shifts.
Tweaked: Updated UI to better distinguish between “page” and “shortcode/code” content types.
= 1.1 (20 February 2025) =
New: Integrated dynamic icon styling support by automatically assigning an icon name based on the uploaded icon URL.
Fixed: Minor admin settings page bugs and improved media uploader functionality.
= 1.01 (15 February 2025) =
Tweaked: Refined admin interface for managing dashboard tabs.
Improvement: Added option to hide the Post Type column when content type isn’t “page” to reduce user confusion.
= 1.0 (10 February 2025) =
New: Initial release of Surecart Dashboard Tabs Manager with full functionality for adding, editing, and removing custom dashboard tabs.
New: Supported dynamic icon styling with media uploader integration.
New: Provided dynamic content sourcing via page/post selection, shortcode processing, and PHP code execution.
I liked this and how it worked, and it fits into my flow I can keep my change logs in GitHub as a text file and just copy and place on deployment, so I settled on this and with a little bit of Bricks Magic and a query loop I was able to make a changelog master page to host all the changelogs.
What’s even better is its a free plugin, I have since found out the author has a knowledgebase and documentation plugin and have reached out to them about functionality https://spider-themes.net/eazydocs/
So with that at least for a little while I am comfortable with documentation and can now get back to doing what I enjoy….. creating content
