Helpful – Article Feedback Plugin

Description

This plugin lets you easily add a “Was it helpful?” survey on your blog or knowledge base pages.

Use this quick pool to understand if your content resonates with your audience and apply the proper improvements to your website.

Pro Version

The Pro Version of this plugin is now available with additional features such as the ability to send email notifications when new feedback is received, export the feedback data, download the single feedback in PDF format, options to configure the feedback form position, and more.

Why should you use a “Was this helpful? Yes/No” survey to improve your content?

People are willing to share feedback when they do not have to make an effort to open the survey and fill out a lengthy form. Consequently, a simple “Was this helpful? Yes/No” feedback form is ideal for finding issues in your articles.

How the plugin applies the “Was this helpful?” survey to your WordPress site?

The plugin, using filters, automatically applies the feedback form at the end of the articles that belong to the configured custom post types. The form includes a custom question like “Was this helpful?” (or “Do you find this article helpful?”, “Would you recommend it?”, etc.), buttons to submit positive or negative feedback, and an optional field that lets the user send a feedback comment.

Browse the feedback data

The plugin collects the feedback value (positive or negative) and, optionally, a comment from the user. These data are stored in a custom plugin database table and available to you in the Statistics menu or from a dedicated Post sidebar section.

Statistics menu

The statistics menu displays statistics on the feedback received by the posts. Here, you will find essential metrics like the positive feedback ratio and the number of positive and negative feedback. In addition, the plugin will also present details on the single feedback values and feedback comments in a dedicated submenu.

We have also included the ability to filter the statistics. So you can, for example, quickly find posts that need improvements by displaying only the ones with a specific positive feedback ratio.

Feedback menu

The feedback menu shows the single feedback received by the articles. Filters are available and can be used, for example, to find submissions received on a specific date, comments that include certain keywords, and more.

Post sidebar section

The plugin adds a new dedicated section named “Helpful” in the block editor sidebar. Here you can easily monitor positive and negative feedback while editing the articles.

Features

Limit multiple feedback on the same article

Prevent multiple form submissions by using cookies or by checking the user IP.

Apply “Was this helpful?” only to specific custom post types

A dedicated option allows you to apply the “Was this helpful?” survey only to specific post types. Use this option, for example, to collect feedback only on your knowledge base pages and not on your blog articles and pages.

Feedback comments

Receive comments from the users. With a dedicated option, you can enable this feature under the following alternative conditions:

• Always
• After a positive feedback
• After a negative feedback
• Never

Multiple Rating Buttons Styles

Select between multiple types of rating buttons. Your options include text-only buttons, icons, and text buttons with icons.

Customizable SVG for the icons

We included high-quality icons in SVG format to submit the ratings.

Currently, the following SVG icons are available:

• Happy face
• Sad face
• Thumb up
• Thumb down

Note that from the plugin options, you can select your favorite icons and customize the icon’s colors.

Content customizations

Configure the exact textual content displayed in the form. With this feature, you can, for example, change the “Was this helpful?” question to common variations like “Do you find this article helpful?”, “Would you recommend it?”

Here you can also configure the other sentences included in the form. For example, you can encourage the user to leave a feedback comment with sentences like “We’re glad that you liked the post! Let us know why.”, “How can we make it better?”, “We’re sorry to hear that. Please let us know how we can improve.”

Typography customization

Easily configure the font family, font size, font style, font weight, and line height of any textual element displayed in the feedback form.

In addition, you can load custom Google Fonts by including the embed code in a dedicated plugin option.

Colors Customizations

You can customize the color of any displayed form element with dedicated options.

Spacing

Configure the margin and padding of the form elements with dedicated options.

Back-end customizations

Customize the back-end menus of the plugin, for example, by restricting the plugin menus only to users with specific capabilities, configuring a custom number of paginated items, and more.

Test mode

Test the “Was this helpful?” form with a dedicated “Test Mode” option before going live.

Configure the feedback comment length

Limit the maximum number of characters the users can include in the feedback comment.

Enable the form on a per-post basis

Enable or disable the feedback form on a per-post basis with a toggle available in a dedicated section of the block editor sidebar.

Other Plugins from us

If you like this plugin, please check out our other projects on our website.

Credits

This plugin makes use of the following resources:

• Select2 licensed under the MIT License

Screenshots

Installation

Installation (Single Site)

With this procedure you will be able to install the DAEXT Helpful plugin on your WordPress website:

1. Visit the Plugins -> Add New menu
2. Click on the Upload Plugin button and select the zip file you just downloaded
3. Click on Install Now
4. Click on Activate Plugin

Installation (Multisite)

This plugin supports both a Network Activation (the plugin will be activated on all the sites of your WordPress Network) and a Single Site Activation in a WordPress Network environment (your plugin will be activated on a single site of the network).

With this procedure you will be able to perform a Network Activation:

1. Visit the Plugins -> Add New menu
2. Click on the Upload Plugin button and select the zip file you just downloaded
3. Click on Install Now
4. Click on Network Activate

With this procedure you will be able to perform a Single Site Activation in a WordPress Network environment:

1. Visit the specific site of the WordPress Network where you want to install the plugin
2. Visit the Plugins menu
3. Click on the Activate button (just below the name of the plugin)

Reviews

Font Options don’t work

Alex October 24, 2024

Love this plugin, but none of the font or color changes seem to be taking effect. Update – I was able to get CSS (font and color) to work by targeting the elements in the Customizer > Additional CSS.

great plugin!

heredatedwp June 6, 2024

Useful plugin to receive feedback!

Not bad

Jack February 15, 2024

Not bad. A few small changes would make this a killer plugin: You have to click the Generate button to see the latest stats – why? This stumped me for a while and is unintuitive. If updating the stats every page load is too costly for performance, it could update on a timer/cron. Simplify the plugin options. Some options are quite confusing. Many people will choose to customise with CSS… so all the colour, font and spacing fields can be optional. Theming should be more like Gravity Forms. Allow the Helpful item in the editor sidebar to be hidden. We insert Helpful via a shortcode in the template, so the sidebar does nothing. Despite these grievances I’m very grateful for the hard work that goes into making and supporting a plugin. Thanks for your efforts!

Has lots of potential

simoneromana October 20, 2023

This plugin has lots of potential for sure. How it looks on desktop is nice, however, the mobile version needs some tweaking.

Good, and well supported

sbolt1969 July 17, 2023

Had an initial issue when installing the plugin (database tables were not created), but uninstalling and reinstalling fixed it. Good plug in, and good response from the creators when I hit an issue.

So far so good

antontkachev May 25, 2023

It works. I liked the detailed customization options and the admin side where you can view all the reviews. Glad I found this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.12

September 3, 2024

• Changed default option values

1.11

September 1, 2024

• Major back-end UI update
• The “Feedback” menu has been added
• New options added

1.10

April 7, 2024

• Fixed a bug (started with WordPress version 6.5) that prevented the creation of the plugin database tables and the initialization of the plugin database options during the plugin activation.

1.09

April 4, 2024

• Fixed PHP error caused by missing array type checking.

1.08

January 15, 2024

• Fixed a block editor error triggered when the “custom-fields” value was not included in the “supports” array of the post type.

1.07

September 11, 2023

• Fixed a CSS issue that prevented the SVG icons from being properly displayed on Safari.
• Fixed PHP warnings.
• Pro version links have been updated.

1.06

August 6, 2023

• The production version of the block editor JavaScript files is now loaded.
• The plugin description in the readme.txt file has been updated.

1.05

May 23, 2023

• The feedback form can now be added with a shortcode.
• The dynamic SVG icons of the form are no longer loaded with file_get_contents() but are stored in PHP variables.
• Other minor improvements.

1.04

March 9, 2023

• Update plugin name and description.
• The “Pro Version” page has been added.

1.03

January 25, 2023

• Initial release.