Is it possible to provide an initial question text?

Question

I would like to provide (in some cases) an initial question template which is shown in the editor (instead of an empty text area) when a user asks a question. Preferrably, I'd like to provide this text via the URL, something like:

http://www.question2answer.org/qa/ask?template=*someText*

 Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

I wouldn't hack the core either. The thing is creating a plugin or modifying the qa-theme.php file... don't seem to be choices either, unless you want to parse HTML :/ I hope you really don't.

Anyway, you can still avoid hacking the core and parsing HTML by modifying the Q2A CKEditor plugin itself, which is the one responsible for setting that value. Check this line:

https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/blob/v1.6.3/qa-plugin/wysiwyg-editor/qa-wysiwyg-editor.php#L161

Exactly there add this code:

if (qa_request() === 'ask' && $fieldname === 'content' && !qa_is_http_post() && empty($content)) {
    $content = qa_get('template');
}

Comments

This works, thanks! And it actually works even better than @Ami's version (there, some characters have not been transmitted correctly, for example ">" was displayed as ">" (or so - I mean the html code)). This way is better with regard to upgrades, too - but what happens if the editor plugin is upgraded?

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You'll have to apply this patch again. Anyway, you can't get away without doing so because, as I mentioned above, it is the editor plugin itself what you want to change. If you want to have a longer term solution, you could probably clone the plugin apply this patch and use that custom plugin instead of the default one. But again, it is your call... of course, the safest thing to do will always be not to change anything and use the code core/plugin code as it is :)

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Yeah, ok. I got it :-)

Answer 2

Try this out here . This should work  ( Though I did not tested this . Hope this will work )

At https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/blob/master/qa-include/pages/ask.php#L157 insert below code .

if ( !qa_clicked( 'doask' ) && empty( $in['content'] ) ){
    $in['content'] = qa_html( qa_get( 'template' ) );
}

Comments

Thank you, sounds good, but it didn't work so far... First, I don't have a *qa-include/pages* folder. I used *qa-include/qa-page-ask.php* - is that right? It looks very similar. But when I insert your code, the page just stays white, no content at all. (I have no experience with PHP.)

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Yes that is correct. The file paths have changes a little in Q2A 1.7 to the style Ami put in the answer.

Also, Ami missed the opening brace, it should be

if (!qa_clicked('doask') && empty($in['content'])) {
    $in['content'] = qa_get('template');
}

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Ok, even I should be able to see THIS mistake!! ARG! Thank you, I'll try it in a minute.

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Works so good, thank you a lot! (I never thought this might be so easy!)

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One extra thing I just realised, I think you will need to put qa_html() around the content, because otherwise someone could put something bad in the URL (like a bad javascript) and it will end up on the page.

$in['content'] = qa_html(qa_get('template'));

Also, this is not really the best way to do things because your changes will be lost when upgrading Q2A. You should look into making a plugin to do that.

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Oopss . Sorry guys , I missed the openning brace . Thank you @Scott for pointing this out . I have updated the answer . Thanks :)

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Thanks for the addition!

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@Scott: Just since you mentioned it - is there a good tutorial on how to make plugins? You're certainly right that changing the core is not a long-term solution...

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There is an nice tutorial available . http://www.question2answer.org/plugins-tutorial.php .
Also there are many plugins developed by many developers you can learn from there -
https://github.com/amiyasahu?tab=repositories
https://github.com/NoahY?tab=repositories
https://github.com/svivian?tab=repositories
https://github.com/q2apro?tab=repositories