Like Q&A websites such as Stackoverflow and Quora? Enjoy getting involved over at Yahoo Answers? Want to offer the same functionality to your visitors? The brand-new-shiny-shiny WPMU DEV Q&A plugin lets you do just that.
Features
Full front-end capability – keep your users out of your back end
WYSIWYG Editor for questions and answers
Built-in search
Integrate with any theme
Fully customizable
Voting system for questions and answers
Integrated reputation points system
Profile pages highlighting reputation points
Simply install the plugin, activate it and start posting questions:
Users get rewarded through reputation points which they can view on their profiles:
The Q&A plugin has in built navigation with a search bar and utilizing tags to make it easier for users to find what they need:
Integration with WordPress roles means that it’s easy for you to decide at what level your visitors can ask, answer and view questions:
And finally, it’s easy to style so will work with any theme. Not too shabby, right?
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Looks fantastic!
As far as I can see, this is not fully integrated with buddypress profiles. Will it be soon?
This creates a bit of an issue if I want to use it on the buddypress site I’m building. will my members have to register again in order to use the Q&A feature?
@Scribu – without integration to Buddypress, it’s a waste of effort. What do you need to be able to say for sure if you will add that feature and when it will happen?
When I say integration with Buddypress I mean that the user profile is linked. I’d like a tab on the user’s profile page that shows the questions and answers the user has provided, or at least a list of the questions the user has participated in.
Another helpful item which you may already have is the ability for a user to subscribe to categories (tags or topics) and to be able to manage that from a page in profile/settings. Then when a user went to the Q & A page, they could select to filter by their preferences or see all.
That’s it. I simple filter on the profile and a page to manage the subscriptions.
After using this great plugin, buddypress integrations needs to be tighter. As a minimum, I look forward to having someone ask a question or provide an answer and it show in the activity stream.
Hi, this plugin is great but it lacks three features :
1- Add a comment to the question or the answers (like StackOverflow or OSQA)
2- Customize the Wysiwyg with new button ? Actually, to have a good StackOverflow clone, we need to have a “code” button. ;)
3- Add a Question/Topic in favorite ? It could be nice to have on our profil a list of our favorite questions (and answer) to note have to search them again.
I hope you’re still working on this plugin to make it better ! :)
Have a nice day !
I’m unable to use another language than the english version for this plug-in. How can I translate all the texts into spanish?
By default, there are two archives in the language directory with all the copies (default.po), but if I add the translations into each msgstr, it’s not working.
WPMU Q&A plugin has great features, but with a really big drawback – context irrelevant! Is your site a pure Q&A site? Most likely not. If you have a web page showing a particular model of a car, you probably want to engage visitors by allowing them to ask/answer questions on that page about that particular model. Context-centered Q&A is much more engaging than having a separated context-irrelevant Q&A section on your website.
Can WPMU Q&A plugin be context relevant and integrated into a context page? The answer is YES, but with some extra integration work.
I recently integrated WPMU Q&A lite 1.01 into a website as a context relevant plugin. I’d like to share my experience with other members, who might want the same thing. Since this is just a comment, I’m not going into much details but the basic ideas by doing the two steps: showing Q&A within a context page, and make it context relevant.
1. Integrate Q&A plugin into a context page instead of making it standalone pages:
1.1 Copy the Q&A default template files to your theme’s folder, and add logic to them to check if a request call wants them in context. If so, strip the header, footer and sidebar template tags since a context page will have them already.
1.2 In a context page, include Q&A dependent css and js files, then do an Ajax request to one of the modified Q&A template files. And now, you have Q&A content showing within a context page.
1.3 After the response from a request to a Q&A template file has been loaded in the context page, patch all Q&A links and form submissions into Ajax requests, so subsequent Q&A interactions happen in the same context page.
2. Make Q&A context relevant
2.1 When submitting a question, preppend the context ID (i.e. post ID) to the question title.
2.2 After a Q&A request has been loaded(in step 1.3), hide all question links that don’t have the context ID presented in their text. You may also want to remove the context ID from the question link text and the question title text. And this is it.
This type of integration involves development works. If you’re not into development, you may always get a helping hand from willing developers.
Features
Users get rewarded through reputation points which they can view on their profiles:
The Q&A plugin has in built navigation with a search bar and utilizing tags to make it easier for users to find what they need:
Integration with WordPress roles means that it’s easy for you to decide at what level your visitors can ask, answer and view questions:
Looks fantastic!
As far as I can see, this is not fully integrated with buddypress profiles. Will it be soon?
This creates a bit of an issue if I want to use it on the buddypress site I’m building. will my members have to register again in order to use the Q&A feature?
Talk about perfect timing. I was looking for something like that.
- Tony
@myparnasa: No, your members will not have to register again.
At most, they will have to be assigned a role on the site the Q&A plugin will be activated, if they don’t have one.
Closer integration with BuddyPress profiles is under consideration for the next version.
Do we have to pay any licensing fees to that Stack Exchange Internet Services company for the use of their copyrighted style and design?
Or will there be another theme we can install instead so that we don’t have to deal with their legal team?
Hey, maybe you could come to the following discussion and explain yourselves?
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/88870/wordpress-qa-plugin-blatently-ripping-off-stack-overflow-design
@Scribu – without integration to Buddypress, it’s a waste of effort. What do you need to be able to say for sure if you will add that feature and when it will happen?
I am able to say that this feature will definitely be in the next major release of the plugin.
However, I cannot say when exactly that will be.
But, when you say integration with Buddypress, what exactly are you thinking of?
When I say integration with Buddypress I mean that the user profile is linked. I’d like a tab on the user’s profile page that shows the questions and answers the user has provided, or at least a list of the questions the user has participated in.
Another helpful item which you may already have is the ability for a user to subscribe to categories (tags or topics) and to be able to manage that from a page in profile/settings. Then when a user went to the Q & A page, they could select to filter by their preferences or see all.
That’s it. I simple filter on the profile and a page to manage the subscriptions.
Thanks for the feedback.
I hadn’t thought about the category/tag subscription thing.
After using this great plugin, buddypress integrations needs to be tighter. As a minimum, I look forward to having someone ask a question or provide an answer and it show in the activity stream.
Keep up the great work.
Hi, this plugin is great but it lacks three features :
1- Add a comment to the question or the answers (like StackOverflow or OSQA)
2- Customize the Wysiwyg with new button ? Actually, to have a good StackOverflow clone, we need to have a “code” button. ;)
3- Add a Question/Topic in favorite ? It could be nice to have on our profil a list of our favorite questions (and answer) to note have to search them again.
I hope you’re still working on this plugin to make it better ! :)
Have a nice day !
I’m unable to use another language than the english version for this plug-in. How can I translate all the texts into spanish?
By default, there are two archives in the language directory with all the copies (default.po), but if I add the translations into each msgstr, it’s not working.
I hope the WPMU team could help me!!
ps. I’m not using the lite version.
WPMU Q&A plugin has great features, but with a really big drawback – context irrelevant! Is your site a pure Q&A site? Most likely not. If you have a web page showing a particular model of a car, you probably want to engage visitors by allowing them to ask/answer questions on that page about that particular model. Context-centered Q&A is much more engaging than having a separated context-irrelevant Q&A section on your website.
Can WPMU Q&A plugin be context relevant and integrated into a context page? The answer is YES, but with some extra integration work.
I recently integrated WPMU Q&A lite 1.01 into a website as a context relevant plugin. I’d like to share my experience with other members, who might want the same thing. Since this is just a comment, I’m not going into much details but the basic ideas by doing the two steps: showing Q&A within a context page, and make it context relevant.
1. Integrate Q&A plugin into a context page instead of making it standalone pages:
1.1 Copy the Q&A default template files to your theme’s folder, and add logic to them to check if a request call wants them in context. If so, strip the header, footer and sidebar template tags since a context page will have them already.
1.2 In a context page, include Q&A dependent css and js files, then do an Ajax request to one of the modified Q&A template files. And now, you have Q&A content showing within a context page.
1.3 After the response from a request to a Q&A template file has been loaded in the context page, patch all Q&A links and form submissions into Ajax requests, so subsequent Q&A interactions happen in the same context page.
2. Make Q&A context relevant
2.1 When submitting a question, preppend the context ID (i.e. post ID) to the question title.
2.2 After a Q&A request has been loaded(in step 1.3), hide all question links that don’t have the context ID presented in their text. You may also want to remove the context ID from the question link text and the question title text. And this is it.
This type of integration involves development works. If you’re not into development, you may always get a helping hand from willing developers.