Theme Documentation

Thanks for your purchase! WP-Answers comes in two parts - a theme and a plugin, you can use them both together or just the plugin on its own if you wish to use with an existing theme.

This documentation will show you how to install and configure them so you can get your Question & Answer community up and running in no time.

Support

You may use this form to submit a support query. Our support forum will be up and running again soon.

Installing The Theme & Plugin

Download WP-Answers to your computer as a zip file and unzip it. Inside you will see a folder called "Upload" which contains the plugin directory and theme directory and also these zip files.

Now within your WordPress admin panel, go to “Appearance” > “Themes” > “Install Themes” and at the top, click “Upload” and you will see a box to browse for your theme.

Find the file on your computer and click install. You may or may not have to enter your FTP details on the next step, if so enter them and click “Proceed”

Once the theme has uploaded, click “Activate” and now you can upload your plugin.

Visit "Plugins" > "Add New" > Upload and upload your Plugin zip file.

WP-Answers Options

We have incorporated an options panel into which allows you to manage all aspects of your site. We will go through all the plugin options first, then the theme options. If you dont have the theme activated then the theme options wont appear.

You will see two new menu items added - "WP-Answers" is all the options and "Questions" handles all your questions and answers in a similar way to blog posts are handled.

General Options

The first section is “General Options” and this is where you set the points that can be earned on your site. Users can earn / lose points for the following : asking a question, answering a question, being picked for best answer and for having their comments upvoted / downvoted.

Yahoo Answers

We have built-in support for the Yahoo Answers API so you auto-post content from there for any search terms which will populate your site and look like real content from actual users. To use this you will need to signup for an account here and create a project with your answer site URL. Once you have done this you will be given a consumer key, copy and paste that into this section and click "Save changes".

If you want to set up an auto-posting campaign, jump ahead to this section.

Facebook Settings

To allow users to login with Facebook, you will need to create your own app. Once you have given your app a name, namespace and set the URL of your site you will be given an APP ID and an APP Secret key which you must copy and paste into this section of the options panel.

Twitter Settings

You can also let your users login with Twitter, once again you will need to create an app, enter your site details and URL and you will be given Consumer Key and Consumer Secret Keys which you should copy and paste into the relevent boxes. Then click "Create my Access Token" and copy and paste your Access Token and Access Token Secret keys into the other two boxes.

After setting up Facebook and Twitter apps you should go to the front end of your site and test logging in with each.

reCaptcha

We have included support for reCaptcha which is a Captcha service operated by Google, you can enable this on signup and on question submission - the two points we determined would stop spammers. To use this you will need create an account and some keys for your site. Click on "Add a new site" and enter your site URL and will be give two keys - a Private and Public key, copy and paste these into the boxes here and click save changes.

Reported Posts

This area will list any reported posts from users and allow you to delete them from here.

Edit User Points

You can manually edit any users points on this menu item - all users are listed with pagination at the bottom.

Yahoo Auto Posting Campaigns

To automatically post content from Yahoo Answers, visit this menu item and click "Create New Campaign". Give your campaign a name thats relevent and then enter a search term. Your posts will be based on this search term so check on the Yahooo Answers site that there are results for this term first.

You can also choose which local site to post from, you can choose between UK, US, Canada, Autsralia, India, Spain, Argentina, Italy, Germany, France and Singapore.

After that you will need to choose how often you would like to post, you can enter an interval for days and hours. So if you entered 1 in the days box, it would post once per day. Same, if you post 1 in the hour box, it will post once per hour. You can also combine these, for example 1 in the days and 12 in the hours would post every 1 and a half days.

Finally choose a category and post status for your questions and then make sure the campaign is enabled.

Post Now

We have included "Post Now" option if you would like to manually add some content to your site based on the campaigns you have created. If you visit this menu item, you will see any campaigns you have created listed, enter a number and tick the "Post" box next to the campigns you wish to post from and and hit the "Post Now" button and the posts will be added to your site.

Welcome Email

When a user registers on your site, they are sent a welcome email with their username and password - you can customise this here using the following tags : {%username%}, {%sitename%} and {%password%}.

Theme Options

If you are using the theme, you will see the menu item "Theme Options" where you can choose between a text and image logo and upload your logo and footer logo along with any text to go in the footer and any scripts ( if you wanted to place tracking code for something like Google Analytics).

Typography

Again, if you are using the theme you will see a menu item called "Typography" here you can choose fonts for headings and body text and also manipulate the size and spacing.

Import / Export

The final menu item is called "Import / Export". This is if you want to replicate all your settings on a new site without having to enter them all manually, you can copy and paste the code over to the new site. Also has an option to restore your theme to the default state.

Questions & Categories

You will see another new menu item under "Posts" called "Questions" - this is where the questions on your site are stored. You can go in and manually add, remove and edit any questions that have been added. You also have options for creating Question categories and managing question tags.

Set Up Your Widgets

There are a number of widgets included with WP-Answers, if you are using our theme you will need to add the following : Login / Signup, Top Users and Popular Questions. If you are using your own theme, also add the "Ask a Question" widget ( no need for this with our theme as this is built-in to the theme ).

Using the Plugin with your Theme

If you wish to use the plugin with your theme - upload only the plugin and activate it as usual and it will create a number of new pages on your site, you can edit these after they have been created. You can also create them manually and place the following short codes:

We have included some basic styling for things like the Answer count circles and for user avatars but the look of your site is largely down to your current theme that is being used as our plugin will pick up styles from the theme for things like input boxes and buttons. You are able to tweak the look using the stylesheet included: WP-Answers-Plugin/includes/style.css

Please note: We are able to provide support for any plugin features that dont work but not for theme customisations. We recommend using Tweaky for any customisations.