How can I add AskMeFi functionality in a wordpress blog?

July 23, 2010 11:51 PM

Please help me find a solution which will allow visitors to post, answer and flag as "best" questions in a similar style to AskMeFi on a Wordpress site.

I am trying to set up a website to help trainee teachers and I think a Q&A style page would be a great benefit. I would love to have some of the functionality of AskMeFi - is this possible with any existing wordpress plugins?

I have had a look at TDO Mini Forums but it doesn't seem to do quite what I need. I would really like to avoid the mess a standard forum can create. The ability to mark a question as "answered" and display unanswered questions etc would be brilliant.

I am not desperate to use wordpress either - my hosting is with TSO Hosting so I can use any solution which relies on SQL and PHP.

posted by Morsey to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

What is your level of experience in SQL and PHP? If you were happy doing a little bit of coding yourself, it's a very simple thing to do. Add an extra column in the post table named "best" or something along those lines, then on the pages that show entries/threads insert some code to check the value of best in the post table. An if/else will take care of whether to highlight it or not. You'll also need code to decide who can and can't mark a question and consequently to insert the appropriate data into the database. I mean, it sounds complex but it's not really if you've anything more than simple PHP skills. That said, I am not 100% conversant with WordPress and there may be issues combining your own code with theirs.
posted by Biru at 6:01 AM on July 24, 2010

I don't know if this would help, but just heard of Stack Overflow the other day. More here.
posted by SarahbytheSea at 7:07 AM on July 24, 2010

The other option is to stick with WP and use comment rating or votes. (All you care is that the functionality is there; you can always call it something else.) If you know any PHP at all, showing the posts with no comments is trivial - this gets you Unanswered Questions. I'm pretty sure there's a "highlight comment" plugin where you can manually select a comment to, well, highlight a Best Answer but I've never seen that.

But yeah, Stack Overflow is pretty much what you want right out of the box.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:57 AM on July 24, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the help - Stack overflow looks great, but I'm never going to get enough interest for them to launch a page for me.

It did lead me to Question2Answer which is exactly what I have been looking for. I've managed to integrate it with Wordpress user database, even with my limited PHP/MySQL skills, and now have exactly what I am need.
posted by Morsey at 10:35 AM on July 24, 2010

Another solution is Shapado - it has most of the stackoverflow functionality.
posted by Brent Parker at 10:46 AM on July 24, 2010