medienbaecker/kirby-help-view

Display help articles directly in the Kirby Panel

1.1.2 2025-12-12 18:17 UTC

Requires

• getkirby/cms: ^5.0
• getkirby/composer-installer: ^1.2

MIT

• Thomas Günther

README

A Kirby plugin that adds a help view to the Panel for your clients.

Features

• Custom Panel area with help articles
• Supports categories with nested articles
• KirbyText in articles (links, images, formatting)
• Icons and colors for each article card
• Previous/next navigation between articles
• Breadcrumbs for nested articles
• Multilanguage support

Content Structure

Create a site/help folder with your articles:

site/help/
├── 1_getting-started/
│   ├── article.txt
│   ├── article.de.txt
│   └── article.ja.txt
├── 2_editing/
│   ├── category.txt
│   ├── 1_text/article.txt
│   └── 2_images/article.txt
└── 3_settings/article.txt

• Number prefixes (1_, 2_) control the order
• Folders with article.txt become articles
• Folders without article.txt but with subfolders containing articles become categories. You can add an optional category.txt to overwrite the title.
• For multilanguage support, add language codes to filenames (e.g. article.de.txt). Depending on the user's Panel language, the appropriate article version will be shown.

Seems familiar, doesn't it? I tried to keep it close to Kirby's content structure while also keeping it out of the actual site content so you don't accidentally expose help articles on the public site.

Example article

# site/help/1_getting-started/article.txt

Title: Getting Started

----

Icon: book

----

Color: blue-600

----

Back: blue-200

----

Text:

## Welcome

Your help content here with **KirbyText** support.

(image: screenshot.png)

You can define an icon from Kirby's icon set and colors from the Kirby color variables.

Example category

# site/help/2_editing/category.txt

Title: Editing Content

If you don't add a category.txt, the folder name will be used as the title (e.g. "2_editing" → "Editing"). If you're not having to deal with German Ümläuts (or other fancy characters) in your folder names, don't worry about it.

Options

// site/config/config.php
return [
	'medienbaecker.help-view' => [
		'root' => '/path/to/custom/help/folder'
	]
];

Notes

• Images in articles are served via an API route without authentication. This means help screenshots are technically accessible without Panel login if someone guesses the URL. For most use cases this is fine since help content isn't sensitive but be aware of this if you include confidential information in help images. If you have a better idea how to handle this, please let me know.
• The help menu item only appears if the site/help folder exists.

Requirements

Kirby 5.2.0 or higher (I'm using the new Str::label() method)

Installation

Composer

composer require medienbaecker/kirby-help-view

Manual

Download and copy this repository to site/plugins/kirby-help-view.

Credits

kirby-helpsection by amteich was the original inspiration for this plugin. I've been using it for years and my clients loved it. Unfortunately it has not been updated since 2021 and is not compatible with Kirby 5, so I created this new version from scratch, trying to stick to core components as much as possible.