Online question and answer communities like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Stackoverflow are fun and easy way to learn from others. Q&A sites allow users to ask specific questions on selected topics which are answered by other community members. In this article, we will show you how to create a question and answers site in WordPress. You can create a whole site dedicated to question and answers or you can add a Q&A section to your existing WordPress site.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the DW Question Answers plugin. Upon activation, the plugin creates two new pages in your WordPress site: DWQA Questions and DWQA Submit Question. To edit title and slug of these pages, you need to go to Pages » All Pages and click Quick Edit link below each link.
The next thing you need to do is to allow user registration on your website. This can be achieved by going to Settings » General. Scroll down to the membership section and check the box next to Anyone can register. Make sure that you choose Subscriber as the new user default role.
Now that user registration is enabled, let’s configure the plugin settings. Start by going to DW Q&A » Settings. On the General tab, you can configure the basic plugin settings. Most options here are self-explanatory.
You need to choose the page that will display the Ask Question form and another page that will List All Questions. The time settings allow you to pick how long an individual question will be highlighted as a new question. You can do this by entering the number of hours next to the New Question Time Frame option. You can also set number of days after which a question will be marked as overdue. In the Custom Permalink section, you can enter page slug for single question, single Q&A category, and single Q&A tag.
Now lets head over to the Notification tab. Here you can customize the emails sent to users when a question is asked, answered, or a new comment is added.
On the Permissions tab, you can choose user roles allowed to ask questions, answer questions, and leave comments. By default the plugin allows anonymous users to post answers, but questions can only be asked by registered users. This is a great incentive for users to register.
Managing Your Question Answer Site
You can view all questions added to your site from DW Q&A » All Questions. As an administrator, you can edit or delete any questions submitted by any user on your site.
You can also add Question categories since users do not have permissions to create categories. However, users can add question tags when submitting a question on your site. To understand the difference check out our guide on Categories vs Tags.
The Front End Features of Your Q&A Site
DW Question Answers is designed to fit in with most WordPress themes. This is how your questions page will look:
Questions can be searched or sorted by status, categories, views, and answers. Your users can vote on questions, answers and add their own comments. Users can also follow questions by clicking on the star icon next to each question.
The user who has asked the question and the site administrator has the ability to mark a question as resolved. Users can also vote for answers, choose the best answer, and add comments to the questions and answers as well. This provides a much deeper interaction platform for your users to engage in discussions around the question topic.
This plugin is free and performs very well during our tests. There are several Question and Answer WordPress themes out there, but those lock you in to using that theme forever. The advantage of using a plugin is that you can switch your theme without losing any data.
We hope this article helped you build your own Q&A community on your WordPress site. If you have any questions for us, then please don’t hesitate to leave us a comment below. Also don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Google+.
This is helpful but when I generate a new question the formatting goes all wrong. I have a transparent header and menu and because the questions is generated on a white background I lose this visibility. Likewise as I edit a question page to make it look right as soon as I generate another question the format reverts back. How do I overcome this?
You would want to reach out to your specific theme to see if this is a conflict between your theme and the plugin.
Hello,
I would like to enable the option of adding comments and answers without a need to be logged in and without the requirement for an email address. How can I do it? Right now to add anything person needs to give the email.
Thanks in advance.
Anna
You would want to go into the plugin’s settings to allow anonymous posting or comments
I use a site that the questions asked come in the form of an email. I know postie plugin can convert the email to a post. Can any of the Q and A plugins accept” questions by email ?
We don’t have a specific one we would recommend at the moment but this method does give an option for your users to submit the questions through your site.
Very nice collections of question answer sites, i have found here best question answer site over my search experience. and also its great use for my question’s answer,thanks for sharing such a wonderful sites. thank you very much.
Glad our content could help answer your questions
Sir I can create a one website that is number of user ask IT question.and ans any user.please tell me about requirement to popular website.
I did not find any option to post the answer as an admin. Are they have any?
You can post your anser by visiting your Answer Questions Page link
Its not SEO friendly plugin even Youst Seo is not helpful to index in google of questions. i have convert my bbpress tp DWQA but i think its big mistake. its five days gone and there is 112 new questions but no any indexed in google but with bbpress any questions was indexed within 24-48 hrs. now any one can help me the way to convert DWQA to bbpress again? i am not a coder and its very difficult for me please any one help me :(:(
Hi Vikash
Did you receive any help in the end? I am trying to integrate BuddyPress with DW Questions & Answers but the recommended code
include_once get_template_directory().’/buddypress/bp-custom.php’;
is reporting errors.
Does this plugin support media upload
I had a website name. Now I want to create a page for the students where all question regarding maths, especially for engineering and other numerical questions well be in solved form.. can i use this plugin for numerical question or can i put HTML codes using this plugins? pls explain me . Thank you.
Please contact plugin author for support.
Hi sir ,
Can you please tell me some good free themes with this plugin to work .
Thank You ,
Zain
It should work great with default themes as well. Also check out these 43 beautiful free WordPress blog themes.
How to design my own template for questions and answers…?
Hi,
As I have checked on this plugin that user can login with the wordpress account only. is it possible i can modify it. so that people can login with their gmail, yahoo and other mail account also.
You can try login with Facebook.
i want to create a website for the students where all question regarding maths, statistics and other numerical questions well be in solved form.. can i use this plugin for numercal question or can i put HTML codes using this plugins?
@designwall Thanks for dropping by
Hi everyone,
Thanks WPBeginner for this awesome article about our DW Q&A plugin. We really appreciate it.
@Everyone who is using our plugin and facing any issue or having questions, please feel free to raise it at our Support page: http://www.designwall.com/question/
Our support staff will answer all the questions and issues.
Thanks a lot
Cheers,
Toolbar not work. Please help me
Does this plugin affect website loading time?
hello, is there any way to show particular page related question and answer using wp-answers plugin.
pls advice
thanks.
hello…my friend
tanx a lot for this post…
Vote option in Local working perfectly but in really host dont appear
I disabled all plugin but vote dont appear
please help me
please give me link how to set notification setting… with image
Awesome! I was going to spend $124 in the WP-Answers Pro plugin but I installed this and it is awesome. Any idea about how can I translate it? Thanks
DWQA has DWQA in the “DWQA Questions” literal. Where can this be changed? I didn’t find it in the php code.
I love this plugin very much. Very awesome!
Can I allow anonymous users to post a question without registering?
A very good post! I just instaled dwqa plugin, and I came here from a google search ” what theme should I use with dwqa plugin” I read the all post, I read it how to instal from dw guide original page, but tour post is better then their post :)). Good Job. Checking my site http:// Just kiding, this isn’t a spam comment :). Is my feedback
Does WordPress.com support downloading plugins and installing them? I saw that it doesn’t. Does that mean all the plugins that are mentioned are for wordpress.org?
Yes all the plugins mentioned here are for WordPress.org, please check out our guide on Self Hosted WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com
HELLO SIR THANKS WELL DONE
Thanks for this info
What is the main benefits with this (or this kind of) plugin compared with a forum plugin (like Simplepress) – apart that Q&A obviously is simpler to setup?
It depends on how you use a forum plugin. If you want to use it to create Q&A site, then you would need to set it up in a way so that your users can quickly understand what you want them to do. Using a Q&A specific plugin takes the guess work out of the equation and provides a better user experience.
I have also been looking for something like this. Have not installed yet, but it wasn’t clear if Q&A could be “viewed” without a login. I would want everyone to view the information but have a login to ask a question or answer. Could this be integrated with a plugin that allows login via Facebook, Twitter, acccount, etc.?
Great share I was looking something for free. There is a theme by wp-answer.com which allows importing of question and answers from Yahoo! answers.
how does this integrate with paid membership pro?
We tested it on default WordPress install. Check out plugin’s support forum to find out if it has any compatibility issue.
This plug in is perfect for my site. I followed your directions but the pages are not appearing on my site? Any suggestions on what might be wrong?
You can also create your own pages. Simply create two new pages and then go to plugin settings and use one page as Ask question page and the other page for listing questions.
very informative..
I had a Q&A page on our site for a while (plugin from WPMU) but it was constantly hit with spam. How does this plugin deal with it? Unchecking “anyone can register?” Then what?
According to plugin website they will soon release an update to the plugin which will enable captcha support.
Hi Mark,
DesignWall Team has updated the plugin and support reCAPTCHA from Google.
It also appears you need to use a redirect plugin.. after you submit a question you get a 404 page.
Ok, my mess up you need to leave permalinks at default.
No ,you don’t. Just update your permalink settings.
I was getting that 404 page too, and had to add forward slashes at the start of the permalinks.
@Debra Dalgleish
Just go to Dashboard >> Q&A >> Settings -> Permalink -> Save Changes.
You do not have to change anything just press “Save Changes”button at the bottom of the screen and the 404 issue will be resolved.
It would be nice if you could remove the questions category and tags option. Just have the title and question.
Wow, perfect timing, as I have been debating between a forum and this kind of a plugin for a new site. This helped make my decision
After installing and testing, I did find a couple minor bugs with the theme I am using, but this plugin is in it’s first version I believe, and that is bound to happen. Overall it looks great. Also, going through the support questions it sounds as if they are working on some more specific features as people ask questions or find issues. I see a great future for this plugin… cheers!