Howdy everyone!
Let’s welcome the latest update of our all-time favorite WordPress plugin DW Question & Answer version 1.3.5.
To admit it, it’s been awhile we have not made any major updates to the plugin DW Q&A, nonetheless, we always provide active support for bug fixes on our Question & Answers page. But that’s for 2015, for the upcoming time we plan to upgrade and enhance our DW Q&A plugin with a bunch of great features enabling DW Q&A plugin to be more flexible.
For this update v1.3.5, DW Q&A is fully compatible with the latest WordPress 4.4 and packaged with various bug fixes and useful improvements as well. Notes below will give you a quick walkthrough of these changes:
1. DW Q&A is fully compatible with the latest WordPress 4.4
On 8 December 2015, WordPress 4.4 was released and introduced several new coding standards for Widgets. We adopt this new code practice into this update, and also implement some minor tweaks in theme structures to allow easy integration between third party themes and DW Question & Answer plugin.
2. Change the relation between questions and answers
We made a minor change in the relation between answers and questions in database: now the answer is a child post of its related question. This change is mainly to help us as developers to manage database system easier, while causing no effect to end users. If you have installed the DW Q&A plugin before, you will see a notice message that you need to update your database as in the following screenshot:
We highly recommend you update your database following the instruction as soon as possible, to make your site compatible with the upcoming versions of DW Question & Answer plugin.
3. Add a new language package – Chinese (zw_TW)
We greatly appreciate contributions from you and the community. In this update, we greatly appreciate contribution from Andy for Chinese language (zw_TW) file. Huge thanks to you, Andy 🙂 Up to now, DW Question & Answer has been translated into 20 different languages over the world. If you wish to help us add more languages, you can submit your translation files via Github. Just take a look at the guideline here and submit your language files to Github.
4. Other minor improvements
Thanks to supporting queries from our users, we detected minor bugs related to URL, Language, TinyMCE buttons and so on. We have fixed these bugs and have them released in this latest version of the plugin.
5. [ Upcoming Features ] Additional Extensions for DW Q&A
As mentioned before we plan to release new features for DW QA plugin in 2016. While we continue to improve the core plugin, a few new features will be added in the form of additional extensions. Here are cool add-ons you can expect to see in upcoming versions of the DWQA plugin:
- Quick/Markdown Editor: a simple better editor in UI which integrates with markdown.
- Support Ticket System: Add supporter/moderator role, allow to assign and review before submitting a ticket.
- Restrict/Membership content: Integrate with Woocommerce / Easy Digital Downloads Plugins or Once click PayPal button. This helps you create paid support package. There are cases where site owners want to maintain paid technical support service and users need to buy access to premium support etc., This feature will be possible with (upcoming) payment integration.
- Profile Page: Create a user profile for DW Question Answer.
- User’s following question page: List all questions that user follow; all tags or categories that user can follow or unfollow.
What do you expect to see in the upcoming versions of the DW Question & Answer plugin? Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comment below.