Updating the Ask Me Plugin

I’m finally going to devote some time to upgrade this plugin. There are several things I would like to add to it. My first objective will be to get it work in 2.1.x. I just upgraded one of my blogs to the latest version of WP and installed it and didn’t have any issues. So, I don’t know if the release of 2.1.3 fixed the issues people were having in 2.1.0 and 2.1.1. I’ll have to test it out a little bit more.

I’ve had over 1800 downloads of the plugin so it seems that people are enjoying it which is great. Now, I’d like to get your feedback on anything you would like to see added, or just made better.

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11 Responses to “Updating the Ask Me Plugin”

  1. Ask Rea Maor says:

    YEY !!! Finally…. i SOOOOO love this plugin.. ..

  2. sion says:

    I don’t use WP or any other of the larger blogging tools…my blog is powered by simplePHPBlog.
    I’m interested in if any of these plugins could be used by themselves or if they have to be used only by WP? Not only your’s,but the zillions I see floating out there. I am not a programmer.And I imagine using a plugin outside of the plugins folder it was meant for would require a bit of brainpower…

  3. Erin says:

    I hope the issue with not receiving notification emails will be fixed in the new version, but it’s a pain for me to have to go to options to check for questions.

  4. Dan says:

    @sion: Most WordPress plugins work by extending WordPress’s tables and hooking into WP’s filters to get their input and return their output to the blog. They wouldn’t do anything outside WP since those hooks wouldn’t exist. It’d make more sense to write something fresh than try to use most plugins outside WP.

  5. sion says:

    @dan:I found that out the usual way by trying to manually plop one in to a reg. php web page. I can get some widgets to appear properly but not the specifically for wp ones as,duh, they are written with wp “hooks” as you said. I just wish that some cool widgets were written for both environs:wp or standalone or whateveritscalled.
    And the chances of myself ever writing a widget are pretty slender as I tend to get a little panicked when I look at all that stuff.

  6. Mike Stramba says:

    Hi Sara,

    I just tried to install AskMe on WP 2.1.3, and the “INSERT into wp_posts….’ query is failing as there are a number of fields in that table that have no default value (and those columns are not named) … .

    I edited the INSERT statement and re-ran it, but there seems to be some other problem as the AskeMe page doesn’t show up on the Blog.

    I’ll try again from scratch including re-installing WP (it’s just a test install right now), as I don’t know enough (yet) about the WP plugin installation process.

    I downloaded the AskeMe from both http://www.theblogexperiment.com/plugins/ask-me.php and http://www.wpplugins.org/plugin/ask-me ..(they seem to be the same file).

    wpplugins.org indicates it should run on WP 2.0 ….which I assumed meant woulld include 2.1.3 …. bad assumption I guess :)

    Mike

  7. Sara says:

    Hey Sion…

    When I actually wrote this plugin.. it wasn’t a plugin but instead a PHP script. I imagine that is how most plugins start… as little scripts for the author and then they decide to create a plugin out of it. But typically the scripts aren’t supported at all after people convert it to a plugin.

  8. Rob says:

    So Sara, where can i find the updated version and is it easy to upgrade from the previous? I looked around but i may be blind because i couldn’t find it…

  9. Chantal says:

    Does this plugin work with WP 2.2? I get a fatal error when I go to Options > Ask me.

  10. Chantal says:

    Seems to be a problem with PHP5… On my testserver (which runs PHP4) it works okay.

    Arghhh!

  11. Which Help Desk to Use to Build a Knowledge Base? says:

    [...] plugin called Ask Me. Ask Me lets you get questions and answers up on your site in a hurry (latest Ask Me news). A larger Ask Me database would benefit from a simple category system. There is nothing to prevent [...]

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