[New Plugin] Q2A Ultimate Widgets

Question

Q2A Ultimate Widgets is a pack of useful and new widgets for your Q&A community. Download(zip).

New Features:

• Each widget comes with it's own options, instead of setting options for the whole plugin
• Filters: you can show or hide widgets based on conditions such as user level, user points, visitor/registered, mobile view or desktop browser
• Cache: Some widgets have heavy database queries, so they come with a cache to speed up page load
• Custom styling: you can choose widget's styling based on your theme. currently all widgets come with styling for default theme(snow) but more styles will be added later

List of widgets(32 widgets at the moment):

• 7 widgets for question lists with different sorting(activity, hot, recent, ...)
• Random Posts
• Tabbed Lists(choose up to 3 different list types to show in tabs)
• Questions from the same category as the opened question.
• list of questions eligible to have a selected answer or be closed
• WordPress login form
• Q2A Login Form
• Ask Form
• Search Form
• Google Search
• Q2A activity chart
• Q2A stats chart
• RSS Feed
• Trending Topics(rising tags)
• Accessibility buttons(night mode, font size changer)
• PHP code executer
• MailChimp widget(Mailing list subscription and management)
• Text and HTML widget
• Image with link
• Modal popup window with call to action
• Video Embed Widget(Youtube, Vimeo)
• SoundCloud audio embed
• Alert boxes(which remember if they had been closed)
• Social Media Icons(over 100 social icons and 10 different theme stylings)
• Random content

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Please note that this plugin is in Alpha Version and it had not yet been tested by the community.

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Demo:

Thanks to ProThoughts for providing this demo:

1. Log in as admin using this link.

2. Visit Admin > Layout page.

3. Add widgets and check the results. all this plugin's widget's name start with "Ultimate Widgets".

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Installation:

1. Download the plugin.

2. Extract "q2a-ultimate-widgets" directory and upload it into your Q2A's plugin directory "/qa-plugin/".

3. Visit "Admin > Layout" page and add any widgets you like.

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If you have ideas for the more widgets or want to report a bug please send it to Plugin's feedback thread or submit it on plugin's github page.

If you have added one of the widgets to your site and it didn't show up, it's most probably because you have set conditions for it(in filter options) while setting up the widget and your currently session doesn't match those criteria.

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This Free and Open Source plugin was developed by Towhid from QA-Themes.com. If you needed to hire a professional for freelance Q2A development feel free to ask for a quote on the contact form.

Best Regards, Towhid

QA-Themes.com

Comments

Can we have this plugin?
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/58712/select-option-in-extra-field-of-registration-form

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Hi, If you have ideas for new plugins please send them here: http://idea.qa-themes.com/ideas
I've already developed some of the requested plugins.

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very very useful and working well. Thanks for the great effort.

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How can I delete widgets which I do not want? which folder should I delete?

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Visit "Admin > Layout" page and at the bottom of the page open the page for the widget you created. you can find a checkbox to delete the widget there.

Answer 1

@Towhid, very nice plugin, thanks! Please check performance of plugin. You added many features, hope it is not adding extra load on site.

I installed this plugin on demo site, in case someone would like to check.

http://demo.question2answer.info/

Comments

I tried the theme it has good new features but, I am not able to understand what is donut theme settings

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Hi, I've tested plugin on a large site(not a benchmark, only live performance review), the difference was unnoticeable. I'll add a guide to let users check the demo you provided. thanks for that.

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I don't really think it will affect performance. Worst case scenario you could just comment the lines with the plugins you don't want in the qa-plugin.php.

Alternatively, there could be a setting to store all widgets that should be registered (maybe 32 checkboxes turned into a string composed of ones and zeros? maybe a json string parsed each time?). You won't be able to query the db in v1.7.4 but you are able to do that in v1.8 from the qa-plugin.php by using the load_order after_db_init.

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I can check plugin options to let user activate widget but since Q2A only loads them in a simple array(I think $qa_modules) the resource cost is minuscule.  the only other resource consumer is widget function to get widget options(get_widget_option_form) which only loads for active widgets and caches the output which makes it very fast too.

Answer 2

It's a very good plugin, thanks.
It would be great if you could add the following widgets in the next versions:

- a poll widget which you can vote and see the results in the widget.
- my favourite tags widget with ability to add and remove tags in that widget.
- slider widget to show several images with text
- ability to close(hide) the widgets
- pop up widget in question form such that when you click on the subject area of the question or main area then a specific explanation widget about those areas will appear. Just  like the stackexchange websites.

Comments

Adding both question and content slider was on my plan but I've decided to push them to future versions. both ideas about favorite topics(tags) and closable widgets are interesting and hopefully will be added in future versions. the rest might be better be implemented in separate plugins since it's just a widget pack. thanks

Answer 3

Finally new plugins, well done ! :)

Comments

Thank you Piotr.

Answer 4

This is great! Thank you

However, I found a small problem. If the website is using SSL, then the widget's css is still requested over a non-secure connection, which chrome blocks.

Long story short, is https is enabled, chrome blocks the css loading of the widget!

Can this be fixed!

Comments

Thanks Omid,
If you are using SSL your site's address set in "Admin > General" page should start with "https" instead of "http". changing it should solve the problem. if it didn't work please let me know to check it thoroughly.

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Thanks for the quick reply.

The "Preferred site URL" is correctly set to being with "https," however, the issue still persists!

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I've updated the plugin. please let me know if it solved the issue.

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Is the new version on GitHub?

The last commit there is from 12 hrs ago. I must be in the wrong place!!

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oh oops. It is there!!! Thnk you :D Testing now

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Wow! That was a beautiful fix!
Works like a charm. Thank you...

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You are welcome.

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Another thing I noticed is that if the plugin is enabled, it disables the native "Ask Box" widget as well as "Activity Count", "TagSearch Widget [not native]" and a few other things!!

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Hi, this issue is resolved now. thanks for reporting.

Answer 5

Many thanks for your great plugin!

I found a small bug on the demo site when activating the widget "Recent Questions", the page does not display correctly.

Is it possible to add the widgets "best user of the day", "best users of the category in the week" and "users with more points" in the future?

Thank you for adding some of my suggestions in the plugin. I would like to give you some more suggestions:

-In the "favorite users questions" widget it is important to display the user who asked the question.
-In the widget to remind the user to choose the best answer, it would be interesting to add a minimum period, 1 or 2 days.

-In the "Alert Box" widget it would be interesting to have the option to send an alert to a specific user. It would be very good to warn of breaches of the rules.

- We can add a quick login option, but it would be better to still display a quick registration form.

-There are lists of recent questions, popular questions, etc. It would be interesting to have a list of personalized questions. Questions chosen by the administrator.

- Widget "category posts" could be more "beautiful", like the "related questions" widget.

- Widget with "my updates".

- Widget with "my profile": basic information like points, links to user's questions and answers pages and friends and followers.

- Widget (and page) with the best answers received by the user.

The plugin is very good, thank you for your work!

Comments

1. I couldn't find the small bug you mentioned. maybe since there are no questions in the site the list was empty.
2. I've decided to not to add "top users" widget at the moment since it should either regularly dump user-points to DB and make it bigger or work inaccurately by checking event streams which is also hard on processor. It won't be a problem for sites with a few hundred users, but most of Q2A sites have hundreds of thousands of users; and even with cache it would be a great strain on server resources.
3. Alert box and your last suggestion should have a separate plugins with more elaborate features. but the rest of your suggestions are great and I'll try to fit them into the plugin in future versions.
Thanks

Answer 6

When I am using Random post widget I am getting this two new links on first two questions. How to solve this?

Comments

it randomizes questions then sorts them by how recent they are. so if you don't have many questions it's normal to see them repeated.

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No thats not I am asking.... the widget is working fine... but when I am putting widget on Main area - Top the last questions from widget creating new links as show in picture....like when you click on answered (which I have marked in red circle) then you will redirected to the last questions from widget which is "how the temperature is related to resistance?" ...
Do you understand what is the problem?
I am using candy theme for desktop and snowflat theme for mobile. This problem is not happening in mobile device.
And yeah thanks for the plugin.

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I couldn't create this problem in my development environment and I didn't find an issue in code which could create such a problem. if you want you can send me your site's admin info in privet message, so I can check it myself.