Welcome to the Question2Answer Q&A. There's also a demo if you just want to try it out.
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Scroll to Version 2.1


After all the work and extensive months put towards this project, it's finally here!!

Polaris Theme (Soft PWA)

A carefully thought Material Design theme for Question2Answer.

It has everything you'd wish for a website. It's Fast, Elegant, RTL ready, Dark Mode option, Mobile ready & much more ...

Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)


Carefully Thought

Every step of its development was carefully thought, crafted and perfected to improve the feels and needs for a better user experience.

Responsive Design

With a mobile friendly design to ensure people can still visit your website while waiting in line for their morning coffee.

Well Structured w/ Great Performance

Well structured, with zero HTML Validation errors.
(https://validator.w3.org)

Scores high in Gtmetrix Speed Test. Over 9000!!! (https://gtmetrix.com/tested)

Plugin Compatibility

As of now, Polaris is compatible with: Q2A history, Blog, Pip box, Pupi reactions, Pupi activity/points chart, Question counter, Tag Search, Advanced Search by Pupi, Prev Next Questions widget plugin, Q2A Google Search.

Fired up, ready to go!


First Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Speed Index, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift.

Time for some screenshots:

amp theme, pwa, app, fast, fastest theme, lightweight, speed, pagespeed, google material design, modern, right to left, left to right, arab, arabic friendly, performance, gtmetrix, W3C Markup Validation, validator, dark mode, dark theme, black theme, switch, mobile, cellphone, 2 column, 3 column, best, newest, recent, premium theme.

Click on images to enlarge.


Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)

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+1
@Bharat  Yes I was a bit worried before purchasing due to the demo not being responsive or showing weird behavior, but I can assure you, the problem is really the demo server as it seems to be some very low spec server or maybe it has some massive load from other sites hosted on the same server.

The theme just works great on my 1 GB of ram VPS with 1 vcpu, so don't worry about the demo!
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moved by
demo from my end not working ;(
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I've updated the links to a new server @gausel .
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moved by
I sent you an inquiry via messages, can you respond to it?

9 Answers

+1 vote
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edited by
 
Best answer

Polaris theme - version 2.14


So, I couldn't get over my OCD and had to go after that 100 percent score...

  • Big Structural work!
    Read the Changelog or Readme.txt file to see where the Language files & others are now located.
     
  • Favorites Feed, which is now called Floating Feed received some tweaks.
    - It now shows activity from people you follow, plus activity from your own content.
    - Added horizontal navigation arrows for the Floating Feed on Desktop.
     
  • Added a Favorite tags widget, which is displayed on the sidebar once you add your first tag to your Favorites.
    Widget displays bellow the Floating Feed on Mobile devices.
     
  • Converted all font icons into SVG icons.
    That way icons should be cached as HTML text when using Caching solutions such as Cloudflare.
     
  • Other fixes and UI improvements.


Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)

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+1
That's awesome work @chun. Let me try it.
+1 vote
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Nice work Chun!

The purple color (same in Legacy theme too) is not very professional and many people don't prefer it. Can there be an option to change this via some skin selection? Everyone had liked the color scheme of Muffin theme.

Very eager to try this out. Is the payment made for Muffin upgrade still applicable?
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I've message you the download link via DC.
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Thank you! Theme looks fantastic. Unfortunately the widget from this plugin goes awry.
https://github.com/GATEOverflow/tag-search

Also, is it possible for "Site description" to be taken from database? This can avoid the need to change it for version updates and also make it compatible with network of sites.
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Will check on that. Will also be working on more plugins compatibility and smoothing edges for the next update.
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Thank you. I have fixed this for the tag search plugin -- I think it's more to do with the plugin code. But just the checkbox has a problem with Polaris theme as it's adding an extra padding for all checkboxes which can cause issues if checkbox is in any widget.
0 votes
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All themes are same design. I dont like this answer and views count style.  Please change this count style in your next theme. 

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Thank you for your feedback. Will have that in mind in case Polaris theme owners also raise this concern. As of now, it looks pretty good to me. If you have any suggestions or ideas as of where and how they should be displayed or look better, please do tell. All ideas are appreciated :)
+3 votes
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edited by

Polaris 1.1 (Theme update)


Performance option

There's now a performance option to speed up your front page in order to better rank your website on Google pagespeed. Note: If you're using plugins other than Featured questions and Badges plugin on the front page, some adjustments might need to be done.

Question stats reordered, and icon swapped

The more time I spent using the website, the more wrong it looked to me. So I decided to swap the order of the views counter and votes. Placing the bigger number (views) on top. 

Plus when the number of votes on a questions gets negative, the Votes counter icon will change for a downvote icon. Making it more intuitive and easier to understand that a question stats' are going down.

Plugin compatibility

Compatibility adjustments with plugins: Q2A history, Blog, Pip box, Pupi reactions, Pupi activity/points chart, Question counter.

Other stuff and adjustments.

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Compatibility with the following plugins are also there

Tag Search
Advanced Search by pupi
Prev Next Questions widget plugin
Q2A Google Search
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Thanks for the insight to make these compatible @GATEOverflow ^^
+1 vote
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Great theme!

But just one comment

In muffin it is possible to collapse/extend the qa-nav-main (leftpanel) regardless of screensize. By default it shows for big screens, but you still can hide it.  With Polaris, if you have a big screen the left panel is always there and can't be collapsed. It's true most people want it extended, but I guess it would be nice to give the users the possibility to collapse sometimes if they feel like it? 

It is not a deal-breaker but  maybe it won't be too hard to implement since you already had it in muffin then maybe adding it will be nice.

Thanks 

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Thanks, will think about that. Or maybe create an option where you can add that feature if you like.
+1 vote
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edited by

Polaris 2.0 (Mobile Focus)


Polaris demo - Live Demo 
Screenshots - screenshots (In case demo unavailable)
Purchase - Buy now! 


So... I've been pretty busy these last couple of months...

  • Scan the QR code to see a Live Demo on your phone ➦
  • Mobile Redesign, Desktop Redesign, User Profile redesign
  • Comments Section enhanced experience.
  • Polaris is now a Soft PWA.
    Meaning you can now add it to your phone's Home screen and it will display without the Browser top bar like an App. Back arrow navigation also available.
    (If your users are having difficulties in adding your website to Home screen, check out Recently added Apps won't show up on Home screen)
  • Structure work
  • Added link anchors to Answer Headlines/Title's - <h1>, <h2> etc. So you can link people to specific sections of an answer.
  • Other work. 

Polaris demo - Live Demo 
Screenshots - screenshots (In case demo unavailable)
Purchase - Buy now! 


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moved by
+1

Great theme!

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No problem Chun. You can ignore my other request - - I fixed it using a change in the plugin.
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moved by
I purchased the template but got version 1.1 instead of version 2.0!!
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Just for reference for new readers. The 'template version' question was already answered here: https://question2answer.org/qa/105535/
0 votes
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edited by

Polaris 2.1 (Crafted)

Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)

- Structure work, Performance

- User Experience improvement & components

  • Improved icons.
  • Login Page. Added Show/Hide Password button.
  • Other UX work.
  • On Mobile devices, when a User uses a textarea, it now expands it to fill up the screen for a better user experience while writing content.
    (Only woks with Markdown Editor, and Basic Editor for now.)

- Footer improvements

  • Added Social Media icons to Footer.
  • Added End of Page divider, with an encouragement to vote quote (Say "Thanks" by voting & accepting an answer).
    Scroll to bottom of a question to see.

- Badges widget improved. (Check Q2A Badges plugin update)

- Some other fixes.

Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)

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Oops... Live demo link updated.
0 votes
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edited by

Polaris 2.12


TL;DR

Introducing Automatic Script Optimization (Beta)

You can now "dump" Scripts and Stylesheets into ' Admin > Layout > Custom HTML in <head> section ' and those scripts will automatically get optimized to improve your website's performance and reduce render blocking.

Introducing My Favorites Feed (Beta)

This is also a new feature that adds a feed of activity from People and Questions you follow. This widget is stuck at the top of question lists.

Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)


Full read;

Introducing Automatic Script Optimization (Beta)

Polaris is a blazing fast theme as you can see by the stats and screenshots above. Although once you start adding scripts like Google analytics, Facebook.js, AdSense etc. things start to slow down a bit. No matter how fast your theme is. Especially if you don't know where to place those scripts

With this new update, you can now paste your scripts into the  Custom HTML in <head> section  and the theme will automatically manage and optimize your scripts/stylesheets delivery for you, improving your website's performance.

The theme will respect your async tags, in case you want to be more analytical on what scripts should be loaded first.

If you don't know which scripts you should add or remove async tags, just paste them as they come. Do not change any parts of it. For example Google Analytics already sets an async tag for their script. You should not remove them.

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js"></script>

This is a test run while using a bunch of libraries such as googleanalytics.js, googletagmanager.js, facebooks.js and a few other scripts. Before and after automatic optimization.


Introducing My Favorites Feed (Beta)

This is also a new feature of this new update. A row of floating avatars will appear on top of question lists. As the title suggests, this is a feed of activity from People and Questions you follow.

Keep up with the things you follow in a quick and engaging way.
This will also increase your website's user engagement, as when users are done checking for questions to answer, they can check what's new with the content they follow.


Live demo - Polaris Demo 
Purchase - Buy now!

(Or scan QR code to test it on your phone!)

0 votes
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I previously purchased this theme, can I get the new update for free?
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Sure! Check your email spam boxes. I've sent the update to everybody 2/3 days ago.
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