Welcome to the Question2Answer Q&A. There's also a demo if you just want to try it out.
+55 votes
7.0k views
in Q2A Core by
edited by

Whew. Thanks for all your suggestions! Below is the roadmap for Q2A 1.5, in no particular order.

Major features:

  • Ajax-based commenting and answering.
  • Closing questions as duplicates, or for other reasons.
  • Optional moderation mode for questions, answers and comments.
  • More advanced private messaging (message store).
  • Users can favorite questions, users, tags and categories.
  • Personalized news feed for users showing updates on their favorite items and relating to their posts.

Minor features:

  • Admin can send email to all members.
  • Deleting users completely.
  • Option to send emails via SMTP.
  • Option for 'unanswered' to show questions with no upvoted answers.
  • Separate permissions for up and down voting.
  • Limit account creation rate per IP address.
  • Answer list pagination.
  • Admin can assign bonus/penalty points to a user.
  • Separate permission for changing tag or category of a question.
  • Custom field on question forms.
  • Better dates for older posts.
  • Allow custom pages and links to have minimum permission level.
  • Optional custom explanatory HTML to display to users asking a question, answering a question, or registering.

Developer features:

  • New "filter" module type allowing user-entered input to be validated or modified by plugins.
  • New "search" module type allowing plugins to implement their own content indexing and searching algorithms.
  • Translation support for plugins.
  • Update detection for themes and plugins.
  • Database tables for meta information on posts, users, categories and tags.
  • General mechanism for on-site notifications.
  • Pass more useful contextual information to theme functions.
  • A select list of pluggable functions that can be replaced by plugins.

Each feature in this list was chosen based on several considerations:

  1. How many people asked for it. Obviously, the more, the better.
  2. How easy it would be to implement as a plugin. If it's easy (or indeed has already been done) it needn't necessarily be in the core.
  3. How much it will help plugin developers in future. As Q2A matures, there is more focus on its development as a platform, rather than just a product. The goal is to make it as extensible as possible.

Please note that there is no guarantee that all of the above features will make it into the release, which is scheduled to enter beta in late December.

As several have requested, Q2A will also be available on GitHub, starting with the beta of version 1.5. The primary purposes of this are to:

  • Enable bug fixes to be submitted by the community.
  • Allow users to maintain private branches of the core code, so that their changes are easy to merge into Q2A updates.

However, Q2A 1.5 will not yet be opened to general community development. I would like to personally ensure that the Q2A core remains small, fast and secure, so that anyone installing it can feel confident that it will run efficiently and safely on their site. I feel it's important to avoid the issues seen by projects like WordPress, which has suffered a number of major security issues over the years, despite its outstanding developer community. I'm sorry if this decision frustrates some people - please consider whether you can achieve the same goal using a plugin.

Thanks again for all of the community input into this feature list - off to work!

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I'm not updating the post because last time that led to too many people wanting a nightly build, and that in turn ended up being a bad idea (interim DB changes, etc...) But FYI I've done the majors, all but 3 1/2 of the minors, and only a very small part of the developer features. So I'm still hoping to hit beta before the end of the year.
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@Micangello it says right up there ^^^ late December for the beta. It's usually only a few weeks after that until the stable release.
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Q2A 1.5 beta 1 has now been released - please see link on right.
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Thanks Gidgreen! Will test it on this weekend

21 Answers

+4 votes
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thanks for gidgreen's hard work
+7 votes
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Looks great. We are looking forward to see Q2A on GitHub. :D
+5 votes
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Custom field on question forms!

Woehooowww! cheeky

By the way, how about adding pagination to the Activity list!

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Yes, a custom field on question forms would be excellent. In fact, more than one custom field would be great.
+9 votes
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Impressive!  Thank you for it all.

I agree with your github decision totally - I don't think you should open the core up for group development, as long as you are active as the core developer.  Letting us keep forks is certainly enough, and the reasons you give are spot on.  Looking forward to it!

Really, this list is so comprehensive, there's not much more to say :)  We will all wait patiently now and send you our good energy for your work... maybe people can send care packages / donations as well to keep you alive and well? :)

Be well :)
+1 vote
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Very impressive features list. Thanks Gideon for your efforts.
+1 vote
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A very good features list!! Thanks son much!!
+1 vote
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Great list of features! Looking forward to the release of this version!

Thank you very much for your time and efforts.
+1 vote
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Wow that is certainly a great list of features, I think it will make a lot of people happy :)

Thanks for all your hard work! If there's anything I can help with just let me know.
0 votes
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That`s good, thanks. And how about polls?...
0 votes
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Really great features! Thank you very much for developing this, your the best =)

0 votes
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What's bad on the above list is we definetly need more spam tools like Akismet, aso.
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So I think I was right about Akismet.
0 votes
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As you move the code to GitHub, could you please get rid of the Version and Date from comments in each PHP file ?
It would be easier then to find future real changes.
 
My admiration grows as I'm working with your project - cool !

 

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