What do you want in Question2Answer 1.4?

Question

I plan to start working on Question2Answer 1.4 in March.

Please let me know the 5 most important improvements for you.

As in the past, your opinions will play a crucial role in determining what's implemented.

Thanks and I look forward to your feedback!

Comments

So ~when you plan to finish 1.4 and what features you chosed ? :)

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Please see: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/5037/question2answer-1-4-priorities

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I have been working on a way to replace the vote functionality with the google +1 buttons. I think it would be an interesting feature for future versions.  I also believe that an html sitemap would be extremely helpful. Could be based on categories and sub categories. I believe it would help quite a bit from an seo standpoint.

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I guess this thread is closed.  I really would love to see user groups.  users who can ask questions, and users who can answer them.  It would make it possible to create expert sites, where only registered experts are allowed to respond.

Answer 1

1. Friends Request

2. Display list of friends on profile.

3. Ability to comment on friends profile or other user.

4. Separator tag by comma, like youtube and wordpress, its becoming common. Not many people know hyphen. New user maybe confuse. My whole family call it dash -.

Answer 2

Please add,

- "Asking question in a single page" page.

- Subcategories

- Image upload

to the list

Answer 3

Hello Gideon, thanks for the great application, here's my take on the wishlist:

1 - Metatags Title & Description Option to Set for SEO and CTR reasons

Title Tag is important for SEO reasons, I would love to be able to change title for serps. I would suggest to ofcourse leave the question intact as long title and add the option for the admin to play with the short title which - when filled in - will be used as page title tag for seo purposes, also important because the visible title has effect on click through rate once high in the serps. If no short title is filled in then the system should default to long title as it is now.

Same goes for description, not for seo, but definitely for ClickThrough reasons. Description is often used on the Serps and what is written there has an impact on clickthrough. Keep default description as it is now, as long as special description field is not filled in.

So I would suggest an admin option to set title and description per question.

2 - One page question - For usability purposes.

3 - Number of views of questions, number of comments bit like:

 An option to see questions by:

1. Activity - recently asked questions (as it is now)
2. By # of votes
3. By # of answers
4. By "hotness" - combination of the 1 + 2 + 3

4 - Ability to rate answers from 1 to 5 stars a la amazon customer review system, to indicate how helpful the answer has been. This is slightly different from the votes, a vote on a question for me means I think this is a great question and want the answer as well.

5- Easier templating system, I would suggest a html basis with blocks of php code that pull in the q2a parts. That way the html and q2a engine get separated more.

I would love to see a basic html structure where you can just drop chunks of code on the place where you want to see Q2A engine generated content.

This would also mean one can just take one's site basic html template and just check which output needs to be put where and just put the code chunks in the html layout, upload and q2a does its magic.

Thanks for the great application, really love it!

Comments

I see where you're coming from and maybe it could work. I actually did suggest your way of working to gidgreen before but he convinced me that the function method was superior. I think the problem is balancing stability & fine-grained output control (current method) with perhaps faster & easier development (your method).

Here's an example - say you want to output the Q2A menu using your method. Do you simply call a function in amongst your HTML which outputs the code? Or do you loop through a predetermined array or menu items and output your own HTML code?

With the first method, you are now passing HTML code off to another place and you are maybe separating too much. With the second method it starts getting more complex, plus you are susceptible to any future menu changes, e.g. a different type of menu item that needs to be handled differently.

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Do I call a function in html which then outputs the code, or do I loop through an array.

Well, to be honest, none of both as far as I understand it.

The html template, with the function locators (perhaps that is a better word) is parsed cms-server side and then the cms just outputs the html part with the function parsed right where they should go.

The cms I use works brilliant for me. I can really do what I want with the output and reuse content or parts of it wherever I like and it just plain works. On one of my sites I now have 43 number one positions on google (and that is the ones I track, for long tail terms there are lots more), loads of numer 2,3 an 4 etc as well. As well as 1 and 2, 2 and 3 and I even saw a term where I have number 1 to 4.

Mind you I do NOTHING with backlinks, but all with how I build the site and get things to link and be formatted. And ofcourse the basis is really good content.

I am not just talking nice to look at, but how do you build a site, including q2a, cause visitors & google really love these, but how do you steer with a site so you come up for the titles that you want.

And for that it just makes more sense to have a simpler templating system which is parsed server/q2a side.

It seems to me the current system also parses html with q2a output, BUT I can not see which way to do things there.

I agree with fine grained output control being necessary, but right now I find that very hard.

Let me give one more example, tweets are being used more and more by google for serps. When I tweet a q2a page with a ridiculously long title, which is nothing else then the current question un abbreviated, cause the tweet snippet just takes the page title for that. Now my visitors can not tweet right away, just because the total text is too long because of the extremely long page title.

Fine grained control of output for me would mean I can do something here, making it simpler for my visitors to tweet and retweet, and as a thank you for me making things simpler for my visitors, google finds more tweets and retweets going back to my site and before you know it I have a few more pages on position 1.

Would love to discuss this further with Gideon as well, cause I think it would really bring this application to the next level.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a programmer, and the current application I think is brilliant, but I am good at usability and connecting the pieces so my sites end up on page one again and again. No links and other rubbish needed, just focus on what really adds value for my visitors.

And I can do all that with my current cms, but would love for the same thing to be possible with q2a.

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I hear where you're coming from, and I can see that in the long term a templating system would probably be easier for most people to customize. But for now I'm still focused on building out Q2A's functionality (there's a lot left to do), and this in turn means there will be significant changes to page content in each upgrade. With custom templates, there would be a lot of work for users to do after each upgrade, unlike the current object-oriented approach. Bear in mind also that Q2A's page content and interaction model is a lot more complex than a CMS like WordPress - again, this makes using templates a challenge.

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I understand your focus on functionality first. I'll invest some more time in understanding your templating system then.
Thanks

Answer 4

Thank you Q2A developers! Q2A is my top pick of the QA software packages I know of. My top 5 are:

1. Private fields when entering a question. We need this so that users can enter their orderID numbers if they purchased a product from us. We don't want everyone to know their order number.

2. Private messaging.

3. Attachments for images and also the ability to attach a PDF, ZIP or RAR would be nice.

4. An easy method of decreasing the height of the voting and answer boxes so that each question does not consume so much space on the screen.

5. Badwords list that will not let users post if certain words are used.

Comments

please read this http://www.question2answer.org/qa/5037/question2answer-1-4-priorities

Answer 5

1. Wordpress integration (plugin)
2. Themes (going to share one...)
3. Better profiles for users - frontend (better CSS there)
4. Menu manager
5. User manager - admin (deleting users, etc...)

But as far it's very good platform!

I am a graphic designer interested in everything what can make a user's life easier. If you need any help let me know.

- Kamil

Answer 6

Hi gidgreen,

I have joined this community and used Q2A for my site for a while. I found the concept of Q2A great - just like Google's concept: Simply the best. But its function and usefulness must not be simple. Thank you very much.

1. Sub-category:

My site is chatscience.net. I am trying to make my site become an interdisciplinary community but it is difficult for me to do it. Because Q2A haven't supported subcategory - configuration. I could not make sub-disciplines for such main subjects as chemistry, biology, etc.

 

2. Badges: of course, with visible-badges or other similar ones (that rank contributor), members would have stronger motivation to contribute to the community. We can call this with another name such as honor, medal, etc.

3. OpenID plugin: In some countries such as mine (Vietnam), facebook has been banned. Lots of people cannot access to FB or don't have FB accounts. But they must have any yahoo or google accounts for sure. Therefore, I think OPENID sign-in plugin should be much more useful to my site than FB connect plugin.

4. Answer count: I would like to mark such questions with NO answer as red color (text or background), ones with BEST answer as blue (or its background turn blue). But I don't know how to. I think this is useful for most people, therefore I suggest you to make it as built-in function.

5. Condition based sort: most recent, most voted, most viewed (if you want to extend Q2A function to view-count as stackoverflow :D)

Those are just my own opinion. Thank you again for your innovating this PHP-based Q2A site :).

 

 

 

 

Answer 7

Simple editor

1.Maybe wmd http://code.google.com/p/wmd/ with image upload

2.Or markitup http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/ with image upload

3.Favorite Question

4. Possibility to change best answer to another answer

Answer 8

Notification manager. Example: a user can set how often the email with answers will be sent to him/her. Once a day/week... when it occures... and also email subscribtion for rss of rag or category. Not everyone uses rss readers especially not users so familiar with internet...

- Kamil

Answer 9

I'd like an authentication extension that is made to work with mediawiki.

Answer 10

1. Attachments, attachments, attachments.
2. Badges.
3. Points based permissions.

Answer 11

Salut Giddeon,

Thanx for asking; great strategy for improvement.

• Image upload
• Video embeding
• Possibility to develop answers eventually, like a Media Wiki part, for debates and collective creation of new ideas...
• Facebook and Twitter sharing / like buttons or possibility to add them in the code / template.
• Facebook login control independant from the other tabs of the browser (maybe that's not possible, I guess, because of the cookies...)
• More Ajax - or dynamics (ex : Marquee)

Keep on your good work !

Denis (Wikidee.net)

 

Answer 12

A mobile theme, so when I access my Q&A site from my Android, I get a theme designed for it. Something like WP-Touch for WP.