easyQ Q&A

A complete question and answer community for WordPress, built from blocks.

Visitors ask questions, the community answers, comments and votes, and the asker picks the best answer. easyQ brings the proven feature set of Question2Answer 1.8.8 to WordPress, rebuilt the WordPress way: every page is a block template, every part of it a block, and your theme decides how it looks.

Status: early development, not ready for live sites yet. Asking, answering, voting, moderation, profiles and all Q&A pages work. The settings screen, emails and notifications, the privacy tools and translations are still to come, see what is next.

Features

Questions and answers

• Questions with title, text, category and tags; answers and comments on both
• Up and down votes, best answer selection, related questions
• Question lists: recent, hot, unanswered, most votes, most answers, most views and recent activity
• Nested categories, a tag cloud and a full-text search with relevance ranking
• Editing, closing (as a duplicate or with a reason), hiding and restoring posts

Community and moderation

• Points for questions, answers, votes and best answers, with user ranks and titles
• User levels from registered user to super administrator, mapped to WordPress roles and capabilities
• Flags, an approval queue, user approval and blocking, rate limits per user and IP address, a list of words that are censored
• Posting without an account, if you allow it
• User profiles with custom fields, uploaded avatars and activity lists

Made for WordPress

• Over 40 blocks (question list, voting, answer form, user profile and more) and block patterns, arranged and styled in the Site Editor like any other template
• No stylesheet of its own: the Q&A area takes on the look of your block theme; classic themes are supported too
• Voting, answering and commenting without page reloads, built on the Interactivity API
• RSS feeds, XML sitemaps, search engine metadata and Q&A links for the Navigation block
• Users, roles, avatars and media are those of WordPress; works on multisite
• Accessible markup, checked automatically with axe
• A REST API for every action and documented hooks for extensions
• Privacy by design: no external requests, no tracking

What is next

easyQ is built in phases, see the phase plan:

1. Admin: a settings screen for all Question2Answer options (until then easyQ runs with the Question2Answer defaults)
2. Communication: emails and notifications, private messages, the user wall, favorites and the updates page
3. Privacy and tooling: personal data export and erasure, IP address retention, WP-CLI commands and Site Health checks
4. Release: translations (German included), screenshots and the wordpress.org release

Try it

easyQ is not in the plugin directory yet. To try it on a test site:

1. Build the plugin archive from the source, see Development (npm run plugin-zip), or start the bundled development site with wp-env.
2. Upload and activate it on a site with a block theme, e.g. Twenty Twenty-Five.
3. Open /questions/ on your site. Add the Q&A pages to your menu with the Navigation block, and adjust the page templates under Appearance → Editor → Templates.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.7 or later
• PHP 8.2 or later
• A MySQL or MariaDB version supported by WordPress

How easyQ is built

easyQ is developed with the help of Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. Claude helps above all with code reviews, tests and documentation, which makes development much easier and a lot faster. Every change, whoever wrote it, has to pass the same checks before it is published: the WordPress coding standards, static analysis at the strictest level, unit, integration and end-to-end tests with accessibility checks, and the official Plugin Check.

Principles

• WordPress core guidelines without exception. Coding standards, Plugin Handbook, Block Editor Handbook, accessibility, internationalization and the wordpress.org plugin guidelines.
• No plugin CSS. All styling comes from the active theme.
• Privacy by design and by default.
• High compatibility. Everything is extensible through documented hooks.

The full mapping of Question2Answer features to WordPress is documented in docs/feature-mapping.md, the public hooks in docs/hooks.md and the REST API in docs/rest-api.md.

Development

Prerequisites

• PHP 8.2+ and Composer
• Node.js 20+ and npm
• Docker (for wp-env)

Setup

composer install
npm install
npm run build
npm run env:start

The development site runs at http://localhost:8888, the test site at http://localhost:8889 (user admin, password password). They are two separate wp-env environments: .wp-env.json for development and .wp-env.test.json for the integration and end-to-end tests, which reset its content. Run wp-env commands for the test site with npm run env:test -- <command>, e.g. npm run env:test -- run cli wp plugin list.

Commands

To test against another WordPress or PHP version, create .wp-env.test.override.json (.wp-env.override.json for the development site) and start the environment again:

{ "core": "WordPress/WordPress#6.7", "phpVersion": "8.2" }

Continuous integration

GitHub Actions checks every push to main and every pull request (.github/workflows/ci.yml):

• Markdown linting;
• coding standards (WPCS, PHPCompatibilityWP) and PHPStan, JavaScript and package.json linting;
• unit tests on PHP 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5;
• integration tests on single site and multisite with the latest WordPress on PHP 8.2 to 8.5, and WordPress 6.7 on PHP 8.2;
• end-to-end tests with Playwright and axe; the artifacts of a failed run are attached to it;
• Plugin Check on the release archive, including experimental checks, with warnings failing the run.

Markdown is linted on every run; commits that only change Markdown files skip the other jobs. Before pushing, run the commands above for the parts you changed, at least composer lint, composer analyse and the tests.

Project structure

Conventions

• Code, comments and documentation are written in English.
• Classes live in the EasyQ namespace and follow the WordPress file naming conventions (class-*.php, lowercase directories).
• Every change keeps PHPCS, PHPStan (level max), all tests and Plugin Check clean.
• The WordPress Coding Standards apply in full, including the rules PHPCS cannot check:
  • every file, class, method, function, property, constant and hook has a docblock with @since;
  • hooks get named callbacks, no closures;
  • calls pass boolean flags as named arguments, e.g. error( $option, $actor, check_blocks: false );
  • HTML is valid, with self-closing void elements (<br />) and unique IDs;
  • no @ error suppression;
  • test classes use capitalized words separated by underscores (Feeds_Test), in a file named like the class.
• Commits follow Conventional Commits.

License

easyQ is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later.

Credits

easyQ is based on Question2Answer by Gideon Greenspan and contributors, licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later.