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+1 vote
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LampCMS looks like a great Q&A platform but it appears it's only developed by one guy. I personally love some of the implementations he's made (reputation points for posting answers to social media and javascript rollover effects). However  I also like the plugins for Q2A.

What do you think are the key differences between the two platforms?

4 Answers

+1 vote
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Q2A is written by one guy, too. I doubt anyone here has also used LampCMS but from looking at their features list they appear mostly the same as Q2A.

The big piece missing from LampCMS is extensions/plugins. It seems to have some kind of event hooks like Q2A but that's it.

Although I'm not a huge fan of Q2A's design, it is fairly clear and simple. LampCMS's looks pretty messy. Also, they claim to have more sign in options but only the Twitter and Facebook buttons do anything.
+1 vote
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LampCMS probably has the same functionality, but on first glance it actually looks alot nicer than Q2A. I especially like their user pages (e.g. http://support.lampcms.com/users/12/snytkine). I've found it nearly impossible to customize Q2A's user/member pages. They look horrendous and design is ultimately important in building a Q2A community.

All in all, the main problem with both Q2A and LampCMS is that the developer community is tiny around these programs. So you are stuck waiting till the developer actually adds something. With Q2A it seems like there is one person, Noah, who writes plugins.

Q2A is a great piece of software. I just wish it had some better design and usability features added, and I hope some developers get involved, so that there more plugins for some necessary features.
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yeh I really like some of the ajax additions too, however I'm looking at the plugin system in Q2A and it looks much better documented (if not designed) to say the least.
+1 vote
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Before starting a q2a forum I also checked LampCMS (I liked the clear design and the speed).

I can give one advice: If you don't have a dedicated server, and if you don't have experience with MongoDB, use question2answer! LampCMS depends on both, q2a not. Which makes q2a the winner for porting, maintaining, and developing plugins (at least for me and a whole bunch of other developers).

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Thanks. That's good to know. Q2A works well, so the basic functionality is very good. The problem, though is the design. It's terrible, even if you have the ability customize the theme, certain parts of the theme (like presentation of users), is nearly impossible to theme without major hacking of the code. The WYSWIG tool for Q2A is also absolutely horrendous. Very confusing, and buggy. It should be simple to allow upload of images to questions via a seperate form field, like it's done in Wordpress. Q2A has this functionality via the user profile form, but for some reason they can't add it to the Question form? I thought LampCMS's WYSWIG was absolutely brilliant. Loaded fast and very intuitive for any user.

I just wish that whoever is programming Q2A would look at other programs, like LampCMS and incorporate some of their design and usability features. Programmers usually don't like to focus on design and usability, but ultimately, these things make or break a site. One of the reasons why Facebook became huge, was because it's design was simple, elegant, and it was easy to use (especially for uploading pictures). I could say the same for Google.
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1. you cannot expect that programmers are great designers. Maybe you do a new css theme and send it to gidgreen? Participation is the key.
2. Confirmed, the CKEditor is giving me pain as well (esp. customizing). However, I'm glad that uploading of images works. Btw, you could use Markdown-editor plugin (no wysiwyg though).
3. I also hope that another wysiwyg will be added!
4. would not compare q2a to facebook...
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Some parts are amenable to CSS, others are not and are incredibly hard to customize (example are the user pages). Programmers, shouldn't be designers, I agree, but then they need to look at other similar programs and copy design concepts, like Bill Gates did so long ago.

CKEditor for uploading images, works but very confusing. Even a techie like me, can't use it well. Imagine the average user? Should be easy to upload images via a form and create thumbnails etc.
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check out my post to ckeditor (make it simpler), maybe that helps:
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/13255/simple-ckeditor-how-to-modify-it-to-be-simple-solution
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Thank you, will check it out.
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Personally, I wanted to use Q2A to create a question and answer site around photos that people would upload. But, unfortunately, it doesn't work well because the image support on questions is very weak and most non-techie users can't figure out how to use these WYSWIG tools. So I'm back to Wordpress, where you can do something like this in five minutes. Unfortunately, I hate Wordpress, but what can you do?
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osseonews, you can create a new editor plugin fairly easily. LampCMS appears to use the YUI editor - http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/editor/
But you could also try TinyMCE which I've used on other projects and is nice and simple.
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Thanks. But, I would have no idea how to integrate these better editor plugins into Q2A. I am good at hacking existing code, but I'm really not a PHP programmer.
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@DisgruntledGoat: Could you provide TinyMCE as a q2a plugin?
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In addition to mongodb, lampcms also requires nginx. So be prepared to spend a lot of time building a dedicated server just to get it to run.
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The dedicated server thing you can get over pretty easily through using a bitnami EC2 cloud machine (Amazon Machine Image) it's quite simple once you get the hang of it.
0 votes
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I couldn't get any proper cloud support for Q2A  but lampCMS has proper platforms to support like jelastic , Ec2 and others-

http://blog.jelastic.com/2013/10/22/deploy-lampcms-cloud/

 

And that can be considered as a very big point in current market

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