Answers

Overview

Answers enables the implementation of a Question & Answer system in a Drupal site. Users can post questions and other users can answer them. To see it at work (based on the most recent 7.x-4.x-dev version), head over to its Demo site and have a look at the Questions there.

New version now available for testing (7.x-4.0-rc2)

Please note: this version is not compatible with prior versions.

The most important changes include:

1. Replaces the references module with entityreference (references was at one point likely to be deprecated)
2. Integrates supporting modules into this module (Best Answer, etc...)
3. Improves the interface including better layout and putting comment forms and new answers form on question pages
4. Improves code quality

Some functionality from 7.x-3.x has not yet been ported, in particular the ability to search for questions and also adding questions asked/answers to user profiles.

Thanks in particular to hefox, hussainweb, and bulat for contributions on this over the past year.

Summary of Functionality

What the module does:

• Users can ask new questions
  • Directly ('node/add/question')
  • After searching for similar questions ('questions/start_ask')
• Users can review questions
  • All questions: 'questions/all'
  • Unanswered questions: 'questions/unanswered'
  • Search for questions: 'questions/search'
• When viewing lists of questions, users can sort by title, post date, and number of answers
• Users can post answers to questions
• When displaying a question, the system shows the answers to that question.

The displays are based on standard CCK node displays and Views, so can be themed in the typical ways.

For more detail and configuration options, see the file "answers.readme.txt" in the module.

Supporting Modules

There are some supporting modules:

• Best Answer: Enables question authors to select a best answer. Depending on a setting, this will lock the question
• Answers Voting: Enables users to vote answers and questions up/down
• Answers Userpoints: Adds user reputations to Answers (using integration with UserPoints) following a point system like that on StackExchange
• Expire Questions: Automatically expire questions after a set amount of time has past
• Relevant Answers: Provide blocks which can be placed on pages to capture and display questions specific to each page
• Answers Taxonomy: Adds tags to questions.

These modules relate to the 7.x-3.x version, and have been transformed to sub-modules of the Answers module in the 7.x-4.x version.

Module Dependencies