Q2A roadmap - 1.7 and beyond

Question

Thanks to everyone for the many suggestions. I've read them all and taken what I feel are the best and most popular features to add or improve.

From here on I am hoping to make more frequent, but smaller, releases. So version 1.7 will contain a few of the requested features, and 1.8 should be released 4-6 months later with more. Below is my current roadmap. This isn't necessarily everything - other things may be added if appropriate - but it should serve as a rough guide :)

Changes already made

These can be found in the dev branch on Github.

• Minimum PHP 5.1.6+ requirement.
• Switched to mysqli.
• Exact join date in user profiles.
• Upgraded to CKeditor 4.3 and PHPMailer 5.2.
• Better parsing of URLs in posts.
• Similar questions list (from Ask page) is now overridable in the theme (q_ask_similar).
• Linked question title on question page, and added "[closed]" where appropriate.

Changes for 1.7

• Make themes responsive.
• Replace tables on users and tags pages with something a little more semantic.
• Speed up loading of questions with many answers/comments.
• Improve private messaging: a page listing all PMs instead of having to find a user and click a link etc.
• More flexible custom HTML areas (widgets), and allowing widget plugins to be placed on page plugins.
• Terms & Conditions on registration: this is obviously important for a lot of people, but I want to avoid adding things that are too specific. I will look at creating a plugin for this; using a combination of extra profile fields and a filter should get most of the way there, but I can add any necessary developer features to make it easier.

Changes for 1.8/1.9

• An improved Notifications system: post replies, wall posts, PMs for each user will be more visible on-site (e.g. an icon/number like Facebook/Reddit/Stack Exchange). May be part of 1.7 if there is time but it's a big job :)

• More control over which pages are displayed (e.g. completely turning off the Users page), and ordering of menu items.

• Comment voting.

• Allow user to sort answers by votes/time.

• Page caching (at least for logged-out users).

Comments

@Scott Good, and Thanks.

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Great job Scott, but can you also add the following to your future plans?
* Widgets of "Related answered questions" & "Related unanswered questions"
* Allow filter user search in the Users page.

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hi Scott, is Jquery going to be updated?

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@scott, any update on roadmap? thanks!

Answer 1

For those who want to test the dev branch with the most up to date changes but are unfamiliar with GitHub you can just download it from this link:

https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/archive/dev.zip

Answer 2

Great ideas Scott. I'm not always around but I will be glad to contribute to Q2A core development by creating a new branch and sending pull request with my updates. I already made some of this features for some customers and my own sites an I think I can speed up this process if we can collaborate on the process.

Comments

can you but this features to us for free^_^
like scott
i will help in translate and I have experience about HTML
all of us can collaborate on this process

and thanx for every one how help Development question2answer
Regard...

Answer 3

sounds great. when will version 1.7 approximately be published?

Comments

no date yet?

Answer 4

Great! Some comments:

• Responsive themes: Ok, let me say I'm not personally in favour of the direction Snow 1.4 is going (I prefer Stack Exchange-like themes, e.g. physicsoverflow.org is also a Q2A site, but has a theme which resembles SE more), but it's fine since we can obviously still keep the old themes (the old snow theme's PHP be compatible with Q2A 1.7 right?). But Snow 1.4 is nice as a mobile theme of course.   
• Private messaging: Yes, please : ) This page should be linked from the top-most bar (.qa-login-bar) for logged-in users. Their user page would be fine too, of course.
• T&C, widgets anywhere, comment voting: Well, there already plugins for that aren't there? So why not just distribute them along with Q2A v1.7 just like Open Search Support, Facebook Login, ReCaptcha, etc. ?
• Answer sorting: Yes, please! I think that this should be not only for answers, but also for sorting questions in question lists. For example, in /qa, /questions, /unanswered, users should be able to sort questions by votes, time.
• Notifications: There are two plugins for this: NoahY's History and q2apro's FB/SO-style notifications. Why not integrate them that contains q2apro's notifications so that the latest unread notifications (and recently read ones) are displayed in a dropdown/whatever when one clicks the yellow number, but there is a link at the buttom of the dropdown/whatever to the full history page of NoahY's plugin? Then distribute this as a plugin with Q2A 1.7 instead of writing new code for this from scratch.

Suggestions:

• Search: Please, the default search plugin is terrible! We need an advanced search engine, which allows users to search for things like [tag] [[category]] closed:yes duplicate:no user:1234 answers:3 infavourites:mine is:comment. Something like Stack Exchange's search engine (click "Advanced Search Tips") but with the category system integrated and more importance to comments (like is:comment should be valid unlike Stack Exchange's search, and unlike Stack Exchange's search, it should search comments (it already does this). I am really waiting for this in Q2A 1.8.
• Unanswered sorts: The unanswered page isn't advanced enough. It should be possible to filter the page just like /qa or /questions, by pages like /unanswered/categoryname or /unanswered.
• Question sorting: Sorting in question lists as mentioned in the previous list.
• Advanced Notifications: Integration of the two complementary notification plugins as mentioned above.