Cloud Publishing for Docs: Google Docs to WordPress

We technical writers love shiny, elegant tools to forge our craft, but serving our startups is about supporting what they need right now in a way that is easy for them to maintain, adapt, and afford. To that end, I want to describe a brand new cloud-based tooling chain for documentation that I helped give birth to this past month: Google Docs to WordPress.

I hear you sighing “But why these? Ew!”, so I offer you a steaming cup of practicality:?

Google Everywhere — In my experience, younger startups standardize on Google Docs, and the interns all come from schools and colleges that use Google Docs. This landscape of common use brings tremendous benefits:

• Collaborative cloud authoring: Users expect to share commenting, writing, and editing with their teams
• Org-level access: Google Suite is not licensed like Confluence, so there’s no running out of or managing seats, or being unable to afford the subscription for needed extensions
• Document management: Users gain comfort with standard skills: create, search, share, move, copy, embed, export
• Version control: Users view version history, compare versions, and restore prior versions
• Controlled styling: Because users cannot create new styles, docs do not explode with styles (as Word does)
• Expanding capability: Style features Page Break Before and Keep With Next snuck in, and more keep coming
• Friction-free: No battling users to give up their comfortable writing environment for the sake of “the docs”

That last one is key for project success: bring the tools to where your coworkers already work each day, and you’re halfway there.

WordPress Everywhere — Groan if you will, but WordPress is still the most popular CMS in the world, running over 43% of all websites and 64% of those using a CMS (Google Bard tells me). Why? Largely because it is free, open-source, and highly extensible, with thousands of very affordable plugins and themes. The barrier to entry for businesses is nil, and finding freelancers to help build it out is as easy as it gets. However, it is not, itself, a good platform for authoring technical documentation. These limitations are deal-killers:

• Not collaborative. WP is an environment for posting content, not developing it with a team before publishing.
• Unintuitive. Our coworkers are comfortable writing in Google Docs but would never touch WP by choice and would rebel at the sight of the Gutenberg Blocks interface.
• No version control. Best practice is to disable native WP versioning for performance reasons. My WP dev assured me most shops rely on Google Docs to keep their source.
• Requires a CDN. Again for performance (and cost), media needs to be offloaded to a CDN, which worsens the complexity for casual authoring.

True confession: It wasn’t feature analysis that brought me to WordPress; it was pure expedience. My shop already had enterprise hosting and its marketing presence in WordPress, and the new online learning initiative was going to extend that platform, making use of low-cost LMS plugins to WP. As I’d be on the hook to maintain content in WP to support those self-paced courses anyway, why not migrate the product documentation there as well, and reuse the same user accounts? That reuse of accounts would be much better for customers than our alternative. Equally important, I faced a formidable Help constraint: I needed a way to push content into Elevio, our existing in-app Help module, and it had an integration plugin for WordPress – and free, at that. The integration I had tried via Confluence through Freshdesk (our prior tool) to Elevio proved far too heavy and expensive.

So … it looked like I would use Google Docs with WordPress, but I faced a tooling disconnect between authoring and publishing. Now what?

Building a Tool Chain — So much searching, but I found no tools that connected the cloud publishing chain I needed, or at least without great effort and expense. Here are the two critical connections I most needed:

• Help Topics — How do I publish and maintain articles in WordPress, keeping the living source in Google Docs?
• Guides — How do I generate branded user guides by combining Google Docs source files?

The breakthrough came from my reaching out to Google Marketplace app developers about what I needed, about how to extend their new tools to my use cases. In both cases, these tools might solve my problems, if only several key features were added. Lucky for me, both developers were interested in reaching a larger market audience of technical writers.

These are the two Marketplace apps that I'm in final testing with, one extending Google Docs, and the other, Google Sheets:

• GoPublish — Connect to one of your WordPress instances, to push out new WP content (any post type) or update it in place.
• Merge Google Docs — Map and generate publishing outputs from a list of Google Docs and a Google Doc template.

This is where these Google Marketplace apps (in yellow) fit into my publishing chain:

In follow-up posts, I’ll detail the new documentation-friendly features of these two tools. Thanks for taking my nerdy tour!