WordPress.com

1. ronaldws
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 3:55 PM

   WordPress.com does not seem to offer a FAQ type plugin. There are such plugins for WordPress.org sites but they seem to only get about 8000 downloads max even though they seem to work pretty well. I did not notice any requests for the functionality when I searched for the topic with a search of these forums. I realize that you can kind of create them without a plugin but when I have tried to do so the results do not seem to look good without css tweaking and manual HTML entry and substantial effort. They are fairly common documents and I am wondering why there seems to be low demand for creating them. Any thoughts?

   I am a developer and have done some work towards developing a system that would make it easy to create a FAQ document on a separate site/page which could be loosely integrated with a WordPress.com blog by linking. I believe that I could also create a plugin that would allow a WordPress.com user to later import that FAQ page into a WordPress.org site if the customer moved to their own site later. Any thoughts on interest/demand for such a product?

   Thanks

2. timethief
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 4:37 PM

   There is no FTP access to wordpress.com free hosted blogs and we cannot upload individual plugins or themes or anything else into them at all -- period. IMHO there have been on indications whatsoever that this is not likely to change any time soon, if at all.

   I accepted that reality when I chose to blog here at wordpress.COM knowing if it did not suit my needs I could hire a web host and download a free install from wordpress.ORG.
   FTP access > http://en.support.wordpress.com/ftp-access/
   plugins http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/
   wordpress.com vs wordpress.org http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

3. ronaldws
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 5:27 PM

   Thank you very much for your feedback but it only seems to partially/mostly answer one of my questions. I am fairly new to WordPress but understood that WordPress.com did not allow direct access to plugin installation and think I can understand the reasons. I was somewhat thrown by the presence of the "Ratings" and "Polls", which appear to me to be pre-installed plugins, but now guess that they seem to be unique exceptions.

   Your own blog has a resources page with many links to sites that provide external functionality to ratings and polls and a note indicating those links may pre-date the inclusion of ratings and polls by WordPress.com. So in the past it appears that people did external linking to get ratings and polls. The second part of my question asked about interest in similar functionality in FAQs.

   Having bothered people about my interest at this point I will still re-pose a questions hopefully advised by your reply. The remaining questions would seem to be:

   1) Is there demand for easy FAQ pages for WordPress.com through external linking, particularly if those external pages could be imported to a WordPress.org site through a plugin later?
   2) (maybe) Is there demand for some kind of facility to build FAQs more easily that would not involve open plugin installation? It appears unlikely that it would reach the level of ratings and polls but doesn't seem to be an otherwise completely unreasonable question.

   Thanks again for your feedback ...

4. timethief
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 5:31 PM

   I don't have a clue what you mean by "FAQs". I use the support documentation provided by wordpress.com for my wordpress.com blogs http://en.support.wordpress.com and the codex for wordpress.org blogs. Are you referring to some other "FAQS"?

5. ronaldws
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 6:22 PM

   What I am really referring to is a "FAQ page" attached to a WordPress site or blog like this good example from WordPress.org, mostly likely done with a plugin here :

   http://www.vickithedemystifier.com/your-questions-demystified/

   and this weaker example probably done without a plugin from WordPress.org here

   http://www.aquaresorts.com/contact-us/faq-policies/

   Again I understand that there are design tradeoffs that, for now, relegate the plugins to WordPress.org sites. The support documentation page example you gave is just a similar style page for wordpress.com as it is nearly uncountably many other sites.

   It is certainly possible from my posts to get confused between the individual "FAQ" questions/answers and pages of collected FAQ questions and answers common at many sites. I am referring in my questions and posts to the latter and interest or demand in allowing the building of such pages as described in more detail in my previous post.

   Thanks
   Thanks

6. timethief
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 6:39 PM

   <blockquote. I am referring in my questions and posts to the latter and interest or demand in allowing the building of such pages as described in more detail in my previous post.

   I think I understand you now. I don't have a need for such a plugin.

7. thesacredpath
   Member
   Apr 4, 2011, 6:48 PM

   The thing is, wordpress.COM is not going to go through the work of implementing a plugin unless there is either a big demand for it, or if they themselves think it would be a very useful feature. And even if there is a big demand, sometimes they simply choose not to do it for whatever reason they come up with.

   The fact that the FAQ plugin has only been downloaded at .ORG 8000 times should indicate that this is not a highly sought after feature, and most people, if they want an FAQ page will just code one up themselves.

   I've set up FAQ sections for about eight clients now as it was something they just "had" to have, but none of them have ever done much of anything with them really, and in most cases I've gone in and deactivated them. 6 months of "coming soon" is enough.

   FAQ pages in general, at least in my experience, have mostly useless information and seldom actually provide the information that people are looking for, or they are outdated, and people usually don't pay much attention to them because of that.

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