Receiving questions on blog, not through comments

[sabi]

Hi, I want to make a page on my blog where users can post questions about a certain topic that I will then answer.

Does anyone know of a plugin that can manage this, or the best way of going about this?

Thank you!

[Dan Grossman]

ses5909 wrote a plugin that she uses to collect and answer questions about herself for her blog. There's a link to download it: http://www.ilovecode.com/qanda/

[ryanhellyer]

You don't need a plugin for that necessarily.

If you visit the Q&A page on the Venus flytrap website in my signature you can see how I just used a regular WordPress page with comments enabled to achieve this effect. The Paged Comments plugin would be a good idea to cut down on the number of questions which are loaded once you get too many - I haven't felt the need yet.

I also use the same method on the guest book for my personal website ... My Guestbook

[sabi]

Thank you for these ideas.

Dan, I have tried to use 'ask-me', but am not able to unzip the folder. She suggests using RAR, but I am on a mac and can't find a workable download.... foiled at the outset!

Ryan - who knew! I love Venus flytraps - never thought there'd be an expert out there blogging on them. I used to have them growing naturally in my garden in Zimbabwe. They were vicious!! Your site is great. I like your Q&A, and am using the comments at the moment, but still hoping to upgrade. I'm still working on my site, and not liking how the comments are displayed. I'll keep trying!

[ryanhellyer]

What changes do you want to make?
Could we have a link to your existing Q&A page?

My next step beyond my Q&A page is to build a simple forum which allows guest posting which I'm slowly plodding away at. You can see my development version here ... http://ryanhellyer.net/test/flytrapgrowing_beta1/forum/

[sabi]

I've found another version of the ask-me plugin which I have have to work, but have some problems with. There's some code that causes headings like "[name] is bugging me to know", "[name] is clueless about" - although these are very cute, they are not really suitable on my site. I found the list in the PHP and changed it but the random things keep coming up! Also the fields (name, email, question) are not easily formatting and don't look very nice....

I like your Q&A page on venus flytraps, as you see all the answers and replies very clearly. With my theme (Grid Focus) I can't get the comment areas to appear under each post (need to click through to single post to leave a comment). I also don't want the Q&A field to have the heading "ask a comment" and not sure how to change this on one page without affecting the comment template.

You can see I'm a beginner - and slightly confused!

My site is www.fairfabric.org/wordpress

and the Q&A is at http://fairfabric.org/wordpress/ask-me/

[ryanhellyer]

Comments.php is the template file which controls all that. If you create a WP Page (not a post) called "QandA" and add an IF statement which detects if you are on the "Q&A" page then you can feed a different comments section to that page allowing it to look quite different from your regular post comments.

[sabi]

ha! Thanks! I'm going to stick with the ask-me plug in, as it works well. Just battling with formatting the fields at the end now...

Thanks for all your help. Good luck with the flytrap beta - it looks great!