Swaru

Help

Help inside your WordPress plugin

Ship a Help panel in your own WordPress plugin: your customers ask from their wp-admin, and your docs answer.

This is for companies that make WordPress plugins. For a WordPress site of your own, see Connecting WordPress instead.

What your customers get

On the admin screens you choose, a Help button opens a panel. It answers from your docs, the same as the chat on your website, and offers Talk to a person when your docs don't answer. A hand-off arrives in your inbox like any chat hand-off, from the email address they type.

  • Their conversation follows them from screen to screen and visit to visit, and the button shows when a person has replied.
  • When they ask for a person, they can tick a box to include their site's setup: the WordPress, PHP, theme and plugin versions and the list of active plugins. Without the tick, none of it is sent.
  • Nothing leaves their site until they type a question or ask for a person.

Set it up

  1. On Integrations, under Help inside your WordPress plugin, an admin presses Turn on the plugin SDK.
  2. It shows your SDK key and a link to download the SDK. The key is public: it goes in your plugin's code.
  3. The download holds the SDK's folder, its guide and an example plugin. Put the support-agent-sdk folder inside your plugin, and start it from your plugin's main file with the lines the page shows. Change screens to your own admin screens.
  4. Release your plugin as usual.

Your customers' sites talk to Swaru themselves. You run no server for it, and no secret of yours goes in your plugin.

The SDK's own guide, inside the download, covers the other settings: who sees the panel, suggested questions, your privacy page and the panel's words.

With Freemius

If your plugin uses Freemius and you connect it here (Freemius, on Scale), give the SDK your Freemius instance. A customer's site that opted in to Freemius then proves which site it is through its Freemius install. That means:

  • the inbox shows the site's plan and licence as Freemius has them, and says its Freemius install is proved. Its address is the one the site gave Freemius, which Freemius does not check;
  • the chat can answer about that site's own plan and licence, such as when it renews or how many sites it covers. It never sees the account behind it, because another admin of the site may be the one asking.

A site without Freemius registers itself on its first question. Its address is only what it says, and the inbox marks it as the site says: not verified.

On wordpress.org

The panel's code all ships in the folder, so there is no remote code. The site sends nothing until someone uses the panel, and the example plugin in the download passes Plugin Check. Your plugin's readme needs an External services entry that says what is sent and when: copy the one in the example's readme and change the names.

Turning it off

An admin can turn the SDK off on Integrations. Your plugin's Help panel stops answering at once and tells your customers answers aren't available. Your key stays the same, so the plugins you have released work again when you turn it back on.

Limits

Questions from your plugin count against your plan's answers like any other. Each person on a customer's site has the same limits as a visitor to your website chat. New sites without Freemius can register up to 300 a day.

Still stuck? Write to hello@getswaru.com.