I had been thinking about putting a question and answer type script on one of my domains for some time now. I couldn’t find any open source ones, but the commercial scripts I found weren’t that expensive. I went back and forth between scripts before finally settling on this question answer script. It seems to have a lot more useful features than the others, and I liked the layout a bit more with this one as well. After screwing around with their demo for a few days, I finally pulled the trigger and purchased the script.
It installed in a snap with their custom made installer, had my logo up, and first user created in under five minutes. I love when things are easy. Apparently there is a way to import questions from Yahoo, but I chose to start fresh. That may be a mistake, but I like having the freedom to create my own custom categories. I’m sure if you’re importing from someplace else, your categories need to match up. Regardless, this was a very quick and painless install and most of the administration settings were very intuitive. I even had some Google Adsense ads up there five minutes after the install.
The only thing I really wasn’t happy about is the theme selection. I wasn’t crazy about most of the themes I saw in the demo, but there was one I did like. All of the themes squared off the script which left unused space on the sides. The one theme I like wasn’t squared off and the entire background was the same color, so even if the sides weren’t used, it still blended in with the rest of the white space and made the site look like it filled up more of the screen. Well, when I installed the script I realized the theme I wanted was not available. I opened a support ticket and I was told there is a big upgrade to the script coming in early January and this theme as well as many other improvements will be included and will be available to all current answer script owners. I feel like I am now stuck waiting another month before I have the site the way I want it. Every person I’ve communicated with has been really nice and helpful, so I’m just going to be patient and familiarize myself with the software further while I wait for my theme to arrive.