Why do I need an Answers function on my website?

Here’s why:

• Become the go-to place for questions within your niche
• Increase traffic as people come to you in search of answers
• Improve SEO by constantly generating new, dynamic content
• The more questions that are posted on your site, the more content that you have – content generated for free!

Let’s take a look at the plugin:

Once installed you have a number of different options that you can set. You have the option to choose either the installed CSS, your theme’s CSS or you can use the color picker to choose new colors. I’m always a fan of color pickers – it saves me looking up Hex values

You can choose any page on your site to host your Answers page. I’ve created one called “Answers” (yes, I am soooo imaginative). Here is me asking the important questions in life:

The plugin comes with a widget that you can drop in your sidebar to let your users log in to ask and answer questions.  Like so:

Tip: If you want to only show the WP Answers login widget on the page containing the answers, you could use a plugin like Custom Sidebars to easily achieve it.

The site admin also has options to edit the messages and text throughout the plugin. There is a back end data view which you can use to view all of your questions in one go.

WP Answers for Your Users

WP Answers works on a points-based system. Users need to register to ask questions – when they do they will be given points (50 is the default but you can change this). Points are deducted for asking questions and added for answering questions. This is a fantastic way to encourage ongoing discussion on your site.

Like Yahoo Answers, users can also give each other thumbs up or thumbs down, and the question asker can decide on his/her favorite answer.

There is a user statistic section so your viewers can see who the top ten users are, and view all of the users in one go.  Users can even make friends with each other – I like that. Share the love

So, what could I do with it on my site?

People love to be interactive. And they love to have somewhere to ask questions. Others like to flex those knowledge muscles by answering questions. By implementing this plugin you’re making all of those people happy. It’s particularly good for using on websites where people might need practical help. Here are some suggestions for using it:

• Coding website
• Gardening website
• Cooking website
• Pet website
• WordPress website

Here are a few sites already putting the WP Answers plugin to great use:

• Hobbybook
• Senior Care Answers
• PHP Answers

Get WP Answers here!

Or learn more about the Plugin’s developer – Cristian Merli.

What is your name and where in the world are you?

My name is Cristian, i am from Italy by i live in Lethbridge, AB (Canada)

Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I graduated in Electronic Engineering in 2002, and since then I’ve been developing software. I started with Visual Basic, then moved to C++ and C#. Since I moved to Canada I’ve worked with .NET, Java and PHP, which is my current occupation.

Are you a full-time plugin developer or is it your bit on the side?

I develop plugins for fun and to make some more income.

Why did you decide to put your development efforts into WordPress?

Because I started some new websites and I found that WordPress was the easiest way. At that point obviously I didn’t have everything I needed, so I tried some plugins. But I realized that I needed something more customized for my purpose, something specific, so I thought “I am a PHP developer, why don’t I develop what I need?” That’s how I started.

How much experience do you have working with WordPress?

About 6 months specifically with WordPress, but I’ve been a PHP developer since 2007.

Can you tell me a bit about your plugin and why you wanted to develop it? (e.g was it to solve a problem you encountered, was it for someone else, or did you just wake up inspired one morning?)

I needed a website where people could ask questions and other people could post their answers, I needed Yahoo Answers version for WordPress. I couldn’t find any plugin that matched my requirements, so the only way was to develop one, and to make it exactly how I wanted. This is how I came up with WP Answers.

What other plugins have you worked on?

I’ve worked on other 3 plugins:

• Easy Contact Form: allows you to create custom contact forms for your blog. You can decide which fields will be in the form, and which ones are required. Once you submit the form there is an automatic field validation and if everything is ok you receive an email containing all the information submitted. Recaptcha validation is also provided.
• Weather Info: a simple quick way to show weather forecasts on your site for any location
• Filter Posts in Pages: allows you to select which posts categories will show on your homepage. If you paste a shortcode on other pages you can display other categories on those pages

Do you have a favorite plugin?

WP Answers of course, and also Filter Posts in Pages – I can’t believe that it’s not included in WordPress by default. Who wants all of their posts mixed together on the homepage???

Any chance of a sneak preview of future plugins?

At the moment I am planning to develop a plugin that allows visitors to register on your site without redirecting to the default WP registration page.

Tell me a bit about your development setup and process. What’s your workspace like? Why?

Since I develop WordPress plugins in my spare time, my office is basically my room at home. Just a desk and my laptop, that’s what I need. After developing some plugins I started to optimize my time by creating a standard default plugin - that is my starting point. It’s a plugin template that contains the basic functions and files that I always need in my plugins. All I need to do is to change some default names and values, and then I can start adding custom code for the particular plugin!

What are your essential programs, accessories, toys for developing? What helps you get the work done? Are there any pieces of software you think you should use but you don’t?

I use a web development editor, it’s called Aptana. I think it’s absolutely great, it’s just an editor for web languages, no WYSIWYG involved, but with great features like intelligence, syntax highlighter etc. I am not sure of what I should use beside that, maybe something like Photoshop but I haven’t really needed it yet.

Do you have any favourite plugin development snacks or habits?

Well…yes, I have an internet radio on my desk, it’s always on while I work! I can get any radio station from any country of the world, it’s really cool guys and I promise..it’s a good way to have some distraction!

What else do you do apart from develop great WordPress plugins?

During the day I have my day job – I am a PHP developer for a web development company and this takes up most of my day. Beside that I do some sports, in particular I play soccer - outdoor during the summer, indoor during the winter. I am from Italy and soccer is “everything” there, much more than hockey in Canada (where I live now), just to give you an idea! Then I have 4 kids that make the rest of my time very very busy!!

What is your name and where in the world are you?

Name: Sven Lehnert
Address: Düsseldorf, Germany

Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I’m living with my wife and daughter in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Since 2001 I’ve been earning my money with developing. I started as a java developer developing financial controlling software. After 2 years, I decided that this can’t be my goal and started to go my own way as a freelancer. The first years I just traveled around the globe and tried out what the world could offer me, working in many different jobs, to get a bit more life experience. Around 2007 I started to build a local community for subculture with a friend of mine. At this time BuddyPress popped up and inspired us. Step by step we saw ourselves developing themes and plugins. Things continued, and in the end, we decided to concentrate 100% on developing and designing themes and plugins.

Are you a full-time plugin developer or is it your bit on the side?

Full-time

Why did you decide to put your development efforts into WordPress?

I love the idea of open source, and believe that this is my way.

When I started to look for an open source system to work with I quickly found out, WordPress and BuddyPress is the place for me to stay. There are many thoughts in my mind, why I think GPL is more as just a license, it’s a way of life, but this would blow this interview.

How much experience do you have working with WordPress?

3 years developing plenty of websites, plugins and themes for WordPress. I’m not a ninja, but I feel very home in all the php files, hooks and filters

Can you tell me a bit about your plugin and why you wanted to develop it? (e.g was it to solve a problem you encountered, was it for someone else, or did you just wake up inspired one morning?)

It was my starting point, I wanted to create a BuddyPress community and this plugin was needed. In the end, I just continued to develop the plugin itself, because many people were already using it.

What other plugins have you worked on?

Have a look at my WordPress profile, there are 5 free plugins where I gave my part or did the whole plugin.

But most of my plugin developments are individual plugins for customers.

Do you have a favorite plugin?

BuddyPress!

Any chance of a sneak preview of future plugins?

I’m into BuddyPress theme developing at the moment and building a framework I will upload into the repository hopefully end of next week.

The theme framework will deliver you all functions and classes you’ll need to create a highly customizable WordPress theme with options page. file-uploader, color-pickers…

For more info go here.

Tell me a bit about your development setup and process. What’s your workspace like? Why?

We try to work as funny as possible. Mostly I work with 3 other guys together, listen to music and getting nuts

The Places are changing all the time. It makes us tired to hang around too long in our office.

What are your essential programs, accessories, toys for developing? What helps you get the work done? Are there any pieces of software you think you should use but you don’t?

My MacBook, Aptana, Filezilla, Firebug and all the great stuff. There is nothing I’m missing at this time.

Do you have any favourite plugin development snacks or habits?

Tea and that’s it, I should eat more often…

What else do you do apart from develop great WordPress plugins?

First of all I have a 2 years old daughter, my wife and I split the day, so half of the day I’m with my daughter.

Further I love  traveling, nature and play music, drumming and percussion.

Running events can get messy – especially if your usual way of organizing them is using email and a spreadsheet. If you’re running a lot of events then there’s always the possibility of all-too-human error. A person is signed up for the wrong event, or a payment isn’t chased up on time – or you get the date wrong. Gah!

The Event Espresso WordPress plugin lets you manage your events right in your WordPress website. It’s surprisingly comprehensive, covering all the aspects of event management you can think of, and even some that you haven’t thought of yet. Let’s take a look at some of the great features.

1.    Create Events in your WordPress Website

You can  create as many events as you want. When you set one up you can add all of the information, including signup details, payment details and a Google map. You can set time periods for registration, add custom email confirmations, limit the number of attendees, allow/prevent group registrations… and loads more!

2.    Add Event Categories

Run lots of different types of events? You can put them all into different categories to a make them easier to manage. Here are some ideas for event categories:

3.    Manage attendees and payment information

Event Espresso generates a list of attendees that you can update along with the payment information. You can easily export all of the information to a CSV for storage on your computer.

4.    Processing Payments.

Event Espresso lets you activate five different payment gateways:

• Check/Money Orders
• Electronic Funds Transfer
• Invoice
• Authorize.net
• PayPal

This makes it as easily as possible for your event attendees to pay for your events.

More features!

• Add custom descriptions
• Add recurring events
• Event Location and Mapping
• Custom Email Confirmation
• On-Going Events
• Group Registrations
• Create Blog Posts

Event Espresso is the most comprehensive WordPress Event Management Plugin that you can get. After a one off payment you have your own Event Management System, with no transaction fees, no per-regstration fees, no fees at all.

For only $5 a month you can even get access to Seth’s support forums.

Finally, Seth has donated his plugin to every WordCamp to save them around £30,000 on registrations. We love to see a developer helping out the community!

Get Event Espresso here.

What is your name and where in the world are you?

My name is Seth Shoultes. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I have been in website design and development for over nine years. While working various construction jobs full time. I was a student of the Google University (self taught via Google) specializing in website design and development.

I have a beautiful wife, a two year old son and a baby on the way (due in March 2011.) So I am really hoping that the plugin sales continue to grow, especially since I am working on developing it full time now. We also have really good dogs, Sage and Sierra. They are both Black Lab/Blue Healer mix.

Are you a full-time plugin developer or is it your bit on the side?

I just quit my job November 30, 2010. So I am now a full-time plugin developer

Why did you decide to put your developement efforts into WordPress?

I have dabbled with many of the content management systems that are out there. I found WordPress to be the most user friendly of any other system.

How much experience do you have working with WordPress?

I have been working with WordPress for over three years. I started out building sites for clients using WordPress. I slowly progressed to programming for WordPress about a year of developing websites using only WordPress.

Can you tell me a bit about your plugin and why you wanted to develop it? (e.g was it to solve a problem you encountered, was it for someone else, or did you just wake up inspired one morning?)

My plugin (Event Espresso) is used facilitate event registration and management on self hosted WordPress websites. I actually built the plugin for my wife almost two years ago. She needed a way for people to register for her scrapbooking classes and events. I couldn’t find any good plugins that were easy for a non-tech person to manage events and accept payments. So I went ahead and created my own solution.

What other plugins have you worked on?

I have created a couple of obscure plugins that I never added to the WordPress repository. The only other major plugin is the WP Ejunkie Shopping Cart.

Do you have a favorite plugin?

My favorite plugin is the Gravity Forms plugin. The team at Gravity Forms have done an EXCELLENT job of creating custom form management.

Any chance of a sneak preview of future plugins?

I don’t have any plans of creating any additional plugins at the moment. I am planning on expanding the WP Ejunkie plugin to include reporting features.

Tell me a bit about your development setup and process. What’s your workspace like? Why?

I work in an office in my basement. My development setup consists of a MacBook Pro, a 27″ iMac, and an old Macintosh G5. I have Windows XP and Windows 7 running on Parallels on my iMac for testing the different browsers. Such as everyone’s favorite browser, Internet Explorer 6.

What are your essential programs, accessories, toys for developing? What helps you get the work done? Are there any pieces of software you think you should use but you don’t?

My tools of choice for the developing the plugin (and website design) is Adobe Dreamweaver, my iMac and lots of triple venti latte’s from Starbucks. I really need to start using my screen capture tool to make more videos of the actual plugin in use.

Do you have any favourite plugin development snacks or habits?

I drink lots of coffee. That pretty much keeps me going 18 hours a day.

What else do you do apart from develop great WordPress plugins?

I love spending time with my wife and son, watching movies, and playing XBOX. My main hobby is programming for WordPress.

Welcome Box

Welcome Box is a popover plugin which adds a simple popover to your WordPress website. No one likes a pop-up window, they can be so annoying – like a little kid tapping on your shoulder going “look at me! Look at me!” After a while you become used to going for that “close” button to get that pop-up closed. A pop-over, on the other hand, appears over the top of the website. Rather than jumping up and down in your face a popover just says “hello.”

You can configure Welcome Box to turn on for first time visitors only and there’s a helpful button that allows your visitors to never see it again.

It comes with a number of buttons and images preset. Like so:

It’s very easy to customize. You can set it up to show a webpage. Here it is showing wpplugins.com:

Or you can customize it to show your mailing list:

You can even customize it to show a picture of cat

Cute!!
You could also use the welcome box for:

• Affiliate marketing
• Promoting your mailing list
• Showing off your favorite holiday photograph
• Advertising your latest product
• Publicizing your special offers
• Just saying hello to your visitors

You can download the plugin by going here!

What is your name and where in the world are you?

My name’s Jon and I’m from sunny Wales, UK.

Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I’m an avid computer nerd with a passion for programming cool things.

When I was about 7 I started programming in Visual Basic, and went from there. I was fascinated by how creative you could be with programming (and I wasn’t very good at drawing or music!) and so it wasn’t long before I took an interest in coding websites.

I graduated from university in 2008 with a Bsc (Hons) Computer Science degree and started along the path to becoming a web developer by working (mostly for free) for several IT and website development companies, started to specialise in PHP and MySQL programming, and then decided to go freelance (best decision ever).

For the past 2 years I’ve been working as an individual contractor specialising in WordPress customizations.

I also work part time as the IT Officer of a community centre near where I live.

Are you a full-time plugin developer or is it your bit on the side?

A bit on the side. I see making plugins as a bit of a break from general website development!

There’s a creative side to making plugins, which I enjoy a lot.

Why did you decide to put your development efforts into WordPress?

The first CMS I was introduced to was Joomla, the concept of a CMS being fairly new to me at the time. I could instantly see the benefits but I didn’t find it very intuitive so I started looking into others and inevitably WordPress popped up and has been my favourite ever since and certainly loved by many of my clients past and present.

I love how it’s intuitive, organised, solid/stable, and very easy to code for.

How much experience do you have working with WordPress?

I’ve been working with it for the best part of 2 years now. I can install and configure it, and create and modify themes and plugins.

I’ve lost count of how many themes I’ve made and customized for my clients, but I’ve written 3 plugins for it so far (and I’m just getting started!).

Can you tell me a bit about your plugin and why you wanted to develop it? (e.g was it to solve a problem you encountered, was it for someone else, or did you just wake up inspired one morning?)

Welcome Box

The idea for this plugin just came to me! It was one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if…” moments and I was feeling creative.

I thought it would be cool if you could have a lightbox automatically pop up when a user visits the home page of your WordPress website, which you could use to display anything you want e.g. news, event highlights, images, adverts, promotions.

It gives you the option to display any webpage or image, and whether to display it only once per user per session.

It’s VERY useful for grabbing the attention of first-time visitors, or displaying news to regular visitors!

What other plugins have you worked on?

Post PDE (Protect, Dripfeed, Expire)

This plugin was inspired by a client of mine who needed a way to restrict certain posts to not just ‘members-only’ but only to members who’ve been signed up for a specific number of days. He needed it to control certain features of his WordPress-aMember membership website. We were both surprised to find that there wasn’t already a plugin that quite does the job so… I saw it as an opportunity/excuse to have a go at writing a plugin myself!

It’s incredibly useful if you’re starting a WordPress membership website; it allows you to drip feed content to members rather than give them access to everything straight away.

Do you have a favorite WordPress plugin?

Strangely I don’t. But I guess that’s because my favourite plugin is the one I install just after thinking “I wonder if there’s a plugin for…” and then finding out there is which has just saved me a tonne of hassle!

Of course, if there isn’t one then that’s just an opportunity

Any chance of a sneak preview of future WordPress plugins?

I’m actually working on a new one called ‘Exit Box‘ which I’m about to release soon! [I don't want to reveal any more! ]

Tell me a bit about your development setup and process. What’s your workspace like? Why?

I work from home on my ‘souped-up’ 1.73 GHz (WOW!) 2GB laptop running Vista Basic with Automatic Updates turned off.

I also have my PC which I built myself a few years ago but I only use it as a backup workstation and for recreational things.

What are your essential programs, accessories, toys for developing? What helps you get the work done? Are there any pieces of software you think you should use but you don’t?

I’m very much a code-from-scratch person so to me, the best program is Notepad++ – it’s an advanced text editor with support for all the programming languages I use as a web developer.

I use FTP a lot and I’ve found WinSCP to be the best no-nonsense client.

Hott Notes 4 and MoRun Sticker Lite – these two programs organize my LIFE! Not just my work! I have notes all over my desktop!

What helps me get the work done: I find music essential to my working environment. I use Youtube to listen to playlists, rather than Spotify, iTunes etc. (because I’m a rebel).

Do you have any favourite plugin development snacks or habits?

Tea (I’m British after all).

What else do you do apart from develop great WordPress plugins?

Apart from my web development work, I work out, I love to make/record/mix music, and I love performing with my band. I also do a bit of gaming and have an interest in games programming.

Here’s some help for adding your first plugin… and how you can make it stand out and generally attractive to buyers.

It’s actually pretty simple, just a few steps.

Look at a great plugin listing, like the WP Popover plugin or the All in One SEO pack, and copy/imitate/get ideas from their style:

These plugins sell well partly because they are well written, use images and bullet points, and tell the user *why* they should use the plugin and *what it will do for them* … rather than just what the plugin is

Images work well

Make sure that your screenshot image (the one on the top left of those you have uploaded) is attractive as this will appear in listings.

A colorful picture illustrating what the plugin does (like a Google logo/page for SEO) rather than a WP options page or lots of text will sell more plugins!

Pricing, pricing, pricing… in our experience (and we have a *lot* of experience) the most you should be charging for an individual plugin is $39.

It’s not like the Apple app store so $0.95 is a bit daft, but it’s also not a place where you will sell many $50+, let alone $100+ plugins unless they are absolutely amazing!

Selling 4 x $19 plugins a day rather than 1 x $125 plugin per week is far, far better and allows you to grow your userbase / promotion too!

Make sure you provide lots of useful installation information, people look for that before they buy to be sure they are getting a quality product

If you have additional notes, add them, keep change-logs updated and upload stacks of screenshots… it all works!

Let us know if you have any other tips or questions!

Piles of money like this are being handed to plugin authors!

Of course I can’t give you any specific statistics, but there are 3 plugin authors in there each with 4 figure monthly payments… which isn’t a bad return.

And, almost all of these have been one time downloads… we haven’t even got the subscription model right yet

Which, we are going to be working on this month… so hopefully things will start growing even more.

It’s strange to think that it was just over a month ago that we opened our doors and invited plugin authors to list their plugins on our site. The journey since then has been fantastic and, in all honesty and speaking personally, a lot better than I expected at such an early stage.

Next year is going to be even better as we have a lot of new functionality and changes to bring online – thank you for all your feedback, especially the plugin authors; this is a resource for you, so if there is anything you can think of to make it better / easier and more streamlined then please let us know.

All plugin authors with sales should now have received their first WP Plugins payment (if you haven’t and you have a balance on your account, then please check you have your payment email account set up on your profile).

Some plugin authors surged to a 4 figure balance (a few, a very respectable 4 figures), a few more were biting at their heals in the high 3 figures. I hope to see 2010 enable even more plugin authors to make a living developing plugins for WordPress. It can only be good for the platform to have an increased number of developers devoting all of their time and energy to building fantastic tools and functionality, and maybe, finally, get the credit they deserve.