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Mark
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I think it would be a good idea to create a new area in the landing page of plugins and themes.
So next to Details, Review and Usage you could place a "Common Problems / Hot Tips" area or something like that where dev and staff can insert important pieces of info they have discovered through the process of working out solutions to member problems.
The forum should be the workspace and the "Hot Tips" area should be the reporting place where solutions to common problems are neatly organized (even if they refer back to the forum threads). It's essential to have something like this in between updates, especially since a single update doesn't solve everyone's issues.
Even if it doesn't cut down on redundancy of people asking the question, it will at least make it easier to point people to a place where the question has been answered.
5086 pointsCommunity rank #14Supreme DeityUnpaid StaffLifetime member
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(joined February 2012)
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Hey Mark,
How about a FAQ section instead? Ideally we would want all products to work with every install, which seems impossible, but we would want to get there.
But instead, most plugins have a common set of questions. Like, how to manually insert Facebook comments to a theme template where it doesn't work out of the box and so on.
I think the idea I proposed would be in a question and answer form, so I guess we're essentially talking about the same thing. For me, as long as the solutions from the "workspace" of the forums are transferred over to a well-organized final resting place, then we're making progress.
You mentioned common questions for all plugins, which is great, but I also think there should be plugin-specific FAQs and they should be in the main tab section (Details, Usage, etc.) of the plugin's page.
15 pointsCommunity rank #3994SophomoreJust Getting Started
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(joined July 2012)
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+1 from me. The accumulated q/a in the forums represents an invaluable resource - but it can sometimes be hard to track down previous posts when you are just starting out.
As someone coming off an initial low base - I've found that I don't always have enough prior knowledge to frame my search queries to find where my question has been answered previously - so I am more likely to post it again.
Responses (3)
Inactive (joined February 2012) Likes (0)
Hey Mark,
How about a FAQ section instead? Ideally we would want all products to work with every install, which seems impossible, but we would want to get there.
But instead, most plugins have a common set of questions. Like, how to manually insert Facebook comments to a theme template where it doesn't work out of the box and so on.
What do you think?
Member (joined July 2011) Likes (0)
Howdy Arun,
Sounds good to me.
I think the idea I proposed would be in a question and answer form, so I guess we're essentially talking about the same thing. For me, as long as the solutions from the "workspace" of the forums are transferred over to a well-organized final resting place, then we're making progress.
You mentioned common questions for all plugins, which is great, but I also think there should be plugin-specific FAQs and they should be in the main tab section (Details, Usage, etc.) of the plugin's page.
Thanks for your reply. I hope you like the idea.
Mark
Member (joined July 2012) Likes (1)Liked by: 
+1 from me. The accumulated q/a in the forums represents an invaluable resource - but it can sometimes be hard to track down previous posts when you are just starting out.
As someone coming off an initial low base - I've found that I don't always have enough prior knowledge to frame my search queries to find where my question has been answered previously - so I am more likely to post it again.
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