the official blog

WPQuestions Blog is Moving

Since we’ve begun expanding our Q&A software to include technologies like PHP, Javascript, the Symfony framework and more, we’ve decided not to run separate installs of WordPress and just use one centralized blog.

On that note, we’ve also launched an umbrella site called CodeWise, which is where the blog will live. RSS subscribers who want to keep up with, say, WordPress only, they can use category feeds like this. Going forward, we will have a new category for every site we launch.

Official launch announcement for CodeWise will happen in the next 24 hours.

WP Questions keeps helping people

James Prochnik writes to us:

I just got a question resolved (my nickname is giantbonsai) due to your great new service. I am very happy that you offer this – it fills a niche, and to be honest, I think you could expand your product line to css/html/java etc. It’s a super idea and I hope you all become rich off it, you will deserve it.

Thanks, James. We are glad to know the site was a help to you. And it gives us a good feeling to know this site is allowing WordPress experts to earn some money by helping people like you solve their WordPress problems.

The best day ever on WP Questions

I am pleased to note that the last 24 hours were the best so far for our site, at least in terms of prize money, with $160 worth of prize money being offered. I’m also happy to note that over $2,000 total has so far been paid out to our WordPress experts. Over 7 of our experts have earned over $100. And when I look at our experts page I note that so far 41 experts have earned some money through this site. Congratulations to all!

Customer testimonials

We are always glad to hear when WP Questions works out well for one of our customers. I just stumbled across this post on the forums for the WP eCommerce plugin:

pluggyboy: guys, not sure whether this will help anyone as my configuration was slightly different to that described above (using weight rate with no downloadable products) but I began getting the same error message at checkout.

With no answers here, I headed over to http://www.wpquestions.com and asked the question there, and for $35 got the answer within a few hours, which is available here: http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/144

hope this helps someone, thoroughly recommend the site if you’ve a plugin / theme issue you cant get resolved by the owner, there’s a great community of very skilled people over there who are willing to help for relatively small micro payments.

If you have had a good experience on WP Questions, please contact us and let us know.

Bug fix: handling international characters

Ünsal Korkmaz posted a question about handling Turkish characters. His Turkish characters ( şŞ İı Ğğ Üü Öö çÇ ) did not show up on our site. This was my fault. When I set up the database I unthinkingly accepted the default character set and collation (latin1_swedish_ci) of the server. A better character set, allowing a wider range of characters, is UTF8, so I wrote a script to change the text fields in the database to accept UTF8 characters. So our site should now accept a wider range of characters, from a wider variety of alphabets.

Job posting: a 1 month gig in Philadelphia

I was approached with an offer of a 1 month contract in Philadelphia for some WordPress work. I’ve decided to turn it down, so I will post it here. If anyone is interested, contact me and I can put you in touch with the interested parties:

lawrence@krubner.com

They are looking for some rare skill sets. The site is extremely high volume so the site needs to be spread over multiple servers. They need someone who knows WordPress and who also knows a fair amount about server tuning.

To be clear, they need someone physically there in Philadelphia. This would be 40 hours a week for a month. If you are coming from somewhere else, they may have some per diem funds they can give you to offset your hotel costs.

From my contact:

Out client is looking for a WordPress Operational Expert. This resource is required on-site in Philadelphia for 4 weeks. They are looking for someone who has worked with WordPress extensively in a multi data center environment (a large environment/company). The company is extremely large so they need someone who has worked on sites with very high volume. The resource will be making all the changes, modifications needed within the application as well as getting it up and running on the website, managing crashes, and keeping everything stable. They will also be helping the other members of the team learn how to maintain and keep the system stable. The environment over there is heavy with Solaris, Linux, Apache, and Tomcat.

Are you a plugin or theme developer? Then sign up.

To be good citizens of the open source communities we belong to, we offer to donate 25% of our profits to developers whenever we get questions marked with the custom tags related to their projects (plugins, themes, software). We previously asked developers what they would like to see in a partnership program. We got some good feedback from Michael Fields, Scribu, Ronald Huereca and Scott Kingsley Clark.

The first thing we need to do is to allow developers to register their plugin or theme on our site. Ronald Huereca and Scott Kingsley Clark have already done so. If you have a plugin or theme, then you should register too. Where the form asks you to type in keywords, it is normally enough to simply type in the name of your software.

Next month we will make it possible for developers (you) to send people to a reserved space on our site, where the person with the question can choose to either wait for you to respond, or offer their question to the whole WP Questions community.

A Hosted Version of the WPQ Software

Over the last 2 months we’ve had a dozen people contact us about licensing the custom software that runs our various question-and-answer websites (WPQuestions, SymfonyExperts and upcoming JavascriptQuestions). We are considering several possible models, but have not yet reached any final decisions.

Right now what we’re considering is a hosted solution, a little bit like Basecamp or WordPress.com, but living at your own domain name.

Some features we could offer:

  1. The site could exist at your own domain. It would live on our server, but to the outside world, it would appear to be your site.
  2. You would use your own PayPal account (in the future perhaps we’d enable other payment methods)
  3. Your site’s questions could be sync’d with a Twitter account you set up.
  4. Customization would be limited to changing the header, footer and some images. You wouldn’t be able to change any of the forms, since that would entail supporting multiple versions of the code.
  5. There would be a monthly subscription fee, plus a percentage of whatever you take in. You could set your own fees, on top of the question amounts.
  6. You could set your own minimum fee for posting new questions.
  7. Easy advertising implementation in the sidebar.

We’d like to open the discussion to existing users of WPQ and see if it sparks and ideas and interest. Let us know what you think!

New feature: subscribe to new questions via email

Several people wrote to us and asked for the option to subscribe via email for notifications of new questions. We just added in this feature today. Go to your personal control panel and click the new option, which you can see highlighted in this screenshot:

wpquestions_user_edit_email_subscribe

There are now 3 ways to keep track of new questions on this site:

  1. RSS feeds
  2. Twitter
  3. Subscribe via email

What support system would be useful for plugin and theme developers?

Over the last few weeks we’ve had several talks with plugin and theme developers. The question was originally “What would make WP Questions more useful as a support platform for you?”

2 issues were raised:

  1. Accuracy
  2. Ownership

The first issue has to do with the possibility of stupid, ignorant answers being given. One developer asked us “What if I send people to your site for premium handling of questions about my plugin, but they get a lot of ignorant answers? How are they suppose to know which answers are best?”

One thought we had here was allowing plugin/theme developers to mark some users on this site as being “certified” to represent that plugin or theme. If the question was about the Pods plugin, perhaps the word “Certified Pods Plugin Expert” would appear next to their name when they post an answer. The plugin/theme developer could mark themselves as certified, and could mark anyone else certified, if they saw fit to do so. Or not.

The other concern was about the risk of lost income – what if a developer sends their premium customers to WP Questions, but then someone else answers the question? Is there a way the plugin/theme developer can “own” the question, at least for a while.

Michael Fields wrote to us with some suggestions (quoted with permission):

“Partnership Program” – This may not be easy to implement, but I think that it has great potential. This would appear to work the same as the affiliate program the difference being that the questions are not public – they can only be answered by the “Partner”. I think that the “Partner” should have a time limit of say 24 hours to claim the question before it goes public. The Partner could also have the option to manually set the question to public if he doesn’t have time to answer. This would allow people to monetize their support without the risk of losing customers to other experts.

We felt this was a great idea, but we had some reservations. First of all, we need to balance the concerns of the plugin/theme developers with the concerns of the customer, and the customer has a right to a fast answer – that is the whole point of the site, after all. Second of all, how would we know when a developer “owned” a question.

Michael wrote:

“Fast answers” would be the only deterrent in my mind as well. But on the other hand, I’ve been studying up on business models revolving around WordPress – you know, the ones that embrace the GPL and profit from support alone… it seems like support is the main money maker in these models. If this is true, I don’t think that “Partners” would be slacking on the job.

I think that ownership is rather easy to determine – at least in my head:

A question would belong to a developer if the question was referred to wpQuestions via their “Partner Link” -> much like an affiliate link. Then – and only then – should the question ‘belong’ to the developer.

These are valid concerns. We are still thinking about implementation details. We are looking for additional feedback from the community. Are there other concerns we should be aware of? Any suggestions about implementation details?