Question2Answer 1.9 development updates

Question

I'm going to use this question to post various updates on Q2A development as it occurs. A few important things to note about v1.9:

• The minimum PHP requirement will be version 5.4. Market share for <=5.3 has dropped below 20%, and those versions have not been officially supported by PHP for over 4 years. If you are still using PHP 5.3 I suggest looking to upgrade as soon as possible.
• The old includes from qa-include/ (directly, not including subfolders) will be deleted. Since v1.7 they were moved to the subfolders (app/, db/ etc) and stubs added for backwards compatibility. Any plugins still using those should update to use the newer includes, for example change
  require_once QA_INCLUDE_DIR . 'qa-app-posts.php';
  to
  require_once QA_INCLUDE_DIR . 'app/posts.php';
• Namespaces are being used in the core code. I wrote a little about this in the docs here but the main gist is that it's much easier to use certain classes - you just use them, no need to include PHP files first.

I will add answers with updates every so often.

Comments

@Gurjyot is it due to mail going to spam? Have you checked if any particular domain like yahoo is causing this?

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Hi @arjunsureh, actually it's not just because they are going in spam. After using SMTP, less emails started to go in spam and even if anyone had an issue the I first say them to check their spam folder. The problem arise when they doesn't find the email even in spam folder. Then I literally have no choice but to delete their account and ask them to try and register once again and then hope that they receive the email this time (in which case, sometimes they do receive the email and sometimes they don't).

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@ProThoughts Plugins have had years to update their includes. Q2A 1.8 gives deprecation notices (in debug mode) so you can check now if there would be any problems with the plugins you have installed.

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Like removing accent in url , if you can this changing for tags , username and category will be better @Scott

Thanks a lot for all your works

Answer 1

January 2019 update

Most of the recent updates have been reorganising/refactoring the code rather than new user-facing features. We've added a new "Controller" system similar to other frameworks like Laravel or CodeIgniter, where URLs like 'user/{str}' for the user profile are mapped to a function like \Q2A\Controllers\User\UserProfile::profile(). This adds a bit more flexibility to URLs and allows for new features like changing the user profile URL structure.

I've also added new database classes, DbConnection and DbResult which use PDO (built-in PHP database library). This has built-in "parameterised queries" which is a simpler system than current queries. There's also a "Service" system so using the database is quite easy and you can chain some commands:

$postList = qa_service('database')->query('SELECT * FROM ^posts WHERE id=?', array($id))->fetchAllAssoc();

Thanks to pupi1985 who helped with a few key parts of the above like adding support for WHERE...IN queries. And Spudley who has contributed a few other refactorings for emails and the recalc system.