Question2Answer documentation

Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A platform for PHP/MySQL, currently running on 24,500+ sites in 40 languages.

Welcome to the Question2Answer docs! This is a community-focused initiative to improve the documentation for Q2A. The docs contains information about installing and using Q2A, as well as developing themes/plugins and an API reference.

This site is hosted via GitHub Pages, using the Jekyll static site generator. Everyone is welcome to contribute improvements - see the contributing page for information about setting up Jekyll locally.

forum

What is a Question & Answer site?

A Q&A site helps your online community to share knowledge. People with questions get the answers they need. The community is enriched by commenting, voting, notifications, points and rankings.

people

Why offer Q&A on my site?

Your members will enjoy the interaction that Q&A enables, and will visit your site more regularly. In addition, many web searches are questions, so Q&A content will attract search engine traffic.

dns

What does Q2A need?

PHP 5.4 or later, with the MySQLi extension.
MySQL MySQL 5.0 or later.

It's strongly recommended to use the latest version of PHP (7.x) and MySQL if possible as they bring many performance enhancements, and Q2A regularly drops support for older, unsupported versions.

settings_input_component

Easy to set up

Q2A takes 5 minutes (or less!) to install.
Easy styling with CSS themes.
Supports translation into any language.
Custom sidebar, widgets, pages and links.
SEO features such as XML Sitemap and neat URLs.

star

Core Q&A features

Fast integrated search engine.
Categories (up to 4 levels deep) and/or tagging.
Voting, comments, follow-on and closed questions.
Points-based reputation management.
RSS, email notifications and personal news feeds.

face

Built-in user account management ...

Create experts, editors, moderators and admins.
User avatars (or Gravatar) and custom fields.
Private messages and public wall posts.
Log in via Facebook or others (using plugins).

assignment_ind

... or integrate with existing sites

Out-of-the-box WordPress and Joomla integration.
Custom single sign-on support for other sites.
Deep integration and customization via plugins.

policy

Fast and secure

PHP/MySQL scalable to millions of users and posts.
Safe from XSS, CSRF and SQL injection attacks.
Beat spam with captchas, moderation and/or flagging.