Different Question Types

Question

I love the Q2A system and interface and don't want to add a blog or forum to it all I want is the option to start a discussion or ask a question..

I've seen it implemented on http://languagelearningbase.com/ - you'll notice the notes and post a note tabs..

Hows this done most easily? with room for expansion eg polls. My users have suggested I add an option to just discuss things and not always be asking a question.

Comments

I also want to know how to make Notes and Post a Note tabs.
Please do share, if you get any success (either in the form of plugin or core changes).
Regards,

Answer 1

It's difficult to tell but they have done quite extensive customization on that site.

For the notes, it appears they are just questions. The "Post a note" must be a custom plugin that adds it as a question to the database, maybe with a particular tag or category. Then the questions page is removing the questions with that tag/category, and the notes page shows only that tag/category.

If you wanted to do something like that yourself, the easiest way would be to add a "notes" category, then link to the ask page for that category (example.com/ask?cat=3). You can modify the theme to highlight notes in the question list.

Comments

That's about as far as I got, I sent an email to them and they responded saying it was heavy core modifications. I can see CSS doing most of the heavy lifting and really keeping the core structure the same and as you say, only displaying certain categories/tags.

I'm going to give tumblr's ever-handy tags_as_classes idea a spin and hopefully have something suitable. Would be nice to use different MySQL tables but that's not really my field or at least some backend work to not have hollow data regarding the 'answered', 'up vote' etc..

Thanks for the response. If I get something pretty solid working I'll share.