Baxtersweb Guide Dots – WordPress Admin Guidance and Client Handover

Baxtersweb Guide Dots helps agencies, developers and site owners document a WordPress website where the work actually happens: inside the admin area.

Place visual guide dots beside custom fields, settings and editing controls. Selecting a dot opens the guidance attached to that position, so clients and editors can find instructions without searching through handover PDFs, emails or external documentation.

Guide Dots is built for contextual WordPress admin guidance. It does not add anything to the public website frontend.

📍 Place guidance on the relevant admin screen

Create a guide from any WordPress admin screen, enter a short instruction, choose its audience and double-click where the dot should appear.

Use guide dots to:

• Explain how a custom field should be completed.
• Document an unfamiliar plugin setting.
• Guide a client through an editing process.
• Record website-specific maintenance instructions.
• Leave technical notes for future developers.
• Remind administrators about an important workflow.

Guide positions are stored against the relevant admin screen, keeping each instruction connected to the interface it describes.

👥 Organise guidance by audience

Group guides into audiences such as Client, Editor or Developer. Each audience has its own name and identifying colour.

The plugin includes three starting audiences:

• Client
• Editor
• Developer

Additional audiences can be created when a guide is added. This makes it possible to separate simple editing instructions from technical or internal documentation.

Audiences organise guidance by purpose. They do not replace WordPress user roles or automatically restrict guides to particular accounts.

🧭 Create guided handover tours

Guides within an audience can be ordered into a structured tour, even when the steps appear across different WordPress admin screens.

Users can move through the sequence with Previous and Next controls. Guide Dots opens the relevant admin screen and brings the active guide into view as the tour progresses.

The Guide Manager provides a shareable tour link for each audience. Tour links open the guides in view-only mode, preventing recipients from editing or deleting guidance while following the sequence.

Recipients must still be logged into WordPress and have access to the admin screens included in the tour.

🗂 Manage guidance in one place

The Guide Manager is available under Tools > Guide Dots.

From the manager you can:

• View guides from across the WordPress admin.
• Filter guides by audience.
• Open or edit a guide on its original admin screen.
• Reorder guides when a single audience is selected.
• Start or share a guided tour.
• Delete individual guides or use bulk deletion.
• Choose whether plugin data should be removed on uninstall.

A screen summary also lists all guides available on the admin screen currently being viewed.

👁 Show or hide guides when needed

Guide dots can be temporarily hidden from the WordPress admin bar without deleting their content.

The visibility choice is stored separately for each WordPress user. Hiding guides for one administrator does not hide them for everyone else.

Suitable for

Guide Dots is particularly useful for:

• Client website handovers.
• Custom WordPress builds.
• Agency and freelance development workflows.
• Content editor training.
• Internal website documentation.
• Ongoing website maintenance.
• Explaining ACF fields and custom admin interfaces.
• Recording technical implementation notes.

Key features

• Place contextual guide dots on WordPress admin screens.
• Add plain-text instructions with line breaks.
• Create separate, colour-coded audiences.
• Add multiple guides to the same admin screen.
• View a summary of guides available on the current screen.
• Navigate ordered guides with Previous and Next controls.
• Build tours that continue across different admin screens.
• Reorder guides within a selected audience.
• Generate shareable, view-only guided-tour links.
• Edit and reposition existing guide dots.
• Temporarily hide guides for the current user.
• Manage and bulk-delete guides from one admin area.
• Retain plugin data by default when uninstalling.
• Run entirely inside the WordPress admin area.
• Require no additional plugin.

What Guide Dots does not do

Guide Dots is deliberately focused on contextual guidance inside WordPress admin.

It does not:

• Display guides on the public website frontend.
• Create public product tours or marketing walkthroughs.
• Replace WordPress roles or access permissions.
• Automatically show different audiences to different user roles.
• Provide a learning management system.
• Replace broader project documentation where long-form reference material is still useful.

Guide Dots works best for concise instructions that relate to a specific admin screen, setting or workflow.

Documentation and support

Documentation: https://docs.baxtersweb.com/guide-dots

For support, use the public WordPress.org support forum so questions and solutions remain available to other users: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/baxtersweb-guide-dots/