FEATURE: 2013.5 - Question and Answer Widget

Store owners can now add a Q&A widget to any page on their store to allow their customers to ask questions and receive answers from either the store owner/admin users or other shoppers.

The widget is context sensitive, meaning if you place it on the product details page, it will display questions and answers for the specific product being viewed. The same goes for category, manufacturer, etc. For any page that doesn't have a specific context, such as the home page, any questions and answers posted in that context will be associated to the specific store they were added on.

This also includes notifications for questions and answers; when a question is asked or a question is answered, if the store owner turns on the "Send New Question And Answer Notifications" setting, both the person who asked the question and any other people who have answered the question will be notified (The New Answer Notification Email setting). Additionally, store owners are notified of all new questions and answers (via the Q&A Notification Admin Email), even if "Send New Question And Answer Notifications" is turned off. The final piece to notifications is that if moderation is turned on, when the post is approved, the poster receives an email indicating that their post was approved (the Q&A Post Approval Email setting).

To enable this feature, add a Q&A widget to the specific page type of your theme that you want to allow questions:

You can then configure the options for the specific widget. Note that each Q&A widget determines whether to require moderation or not:

Also note that the widget does not page, but rather you configure a specific maximum number of questions and answers to show.

Here is what the default layout of the widget looks like in action:

Note that customers can also "Vote Up" or "Vote Down" both questions and answers; this gives an indication of which questions and which answers are most helpful. The store owner can then choose to sort the displayed questions/answers to show the highest voted answers first.

The UI for voting looks like this:

A customer can only vote on a specific question or answer once (but they can vote once for all questions and answers if they choose). The count in green indicates the number of "up votes" for the post and the count in red indicates the number of "down votes" for the post.

In the admin console, users can view, edit, and moderate question and answers from this page: