A Q&A website is an online platform for sharing knowledge, where users can ask their questions, and ultimately generates valuable information for the user through the act of social replies, comments and polls. Quickly solving users' problems will give them an excellent experience and they will like your website as a result, which will help increase the stickiness of your website. Also, Q&A content is more popular with search engines, which will bring you a constant stream of new users.

Question2Answer (Q2A for short) is a very popular free and open-source Question & Answer (Q&A) website script program for servers, developed based on PHP and MySQL. As of writing this post, at least 24500 websites in dozens of languages around the world are using this server app.

As a light, simple, secure, fast, feature-rich and easy to install and set up Q&A system, Question2Answer provides a visual editor, email alerts, supports for answer polls, comments, best answers, following and closing questions, has complete user and permission management, and more. In short, it has basically everything a Q&A platform should have, but without the cumbersome features. So it's perfect for integrating with many existing websites (especially the WordPress-based ones).

Integrating a Q&A feature into a website has proven to be very beneficial and even necessary. For a standalone website, integrating a traditional forum would likely be too bloated and complex, while the integration of a question & answer system will better serve the purpose of answering customer questions. This is where Question2Answer can help you quickly deploy a complete Q&A community, improving the efficiency and quality of communication between webmaster and users.

Key Features

  • Asking and answering questions (duh!)
  • Voting, comments, best answer selection, follow-on and closed questions.
  • Complete user management including points-based reputation management.
  • Create experts, editors, moderators and admins.
  • Fast integrated search engine, plus checking for similar questions when asking.
  • Categories (up to 4 levels deep) and/or tagging.
  • Easy styling with CSS themes.
  • Supports translation into any language.
  • Custom sidebar, widgets, pages and links.
  • SEO features such as neat URLs, microformats and XML Sitemaps.
  • RSS, email notifications and personal news feeds.
  • User avatars (or Gravatar) and custom fields.
  • Private messages and public wall posts.
  • Log in via Facebook or others (using plugins).
  • Out-of-the-box WordPress 3+ integration.
  • Out-of-the-box Joomla! 3.0+ integration (in conjunction with a Joomla! extension).
  • Custom single sign-on support for other sites.
  • PHP/MySQL scalable to millions of users and posts.
  • Safe from XSS, CSRF and SQL injection attacks.
  • Beat spam with captchas, rate-limiting, moderation and/or flagging.
  • Block users, IP addresses, and censor words

System Requirements

  • PHP 5.4+ (with the MySQLi extension)
  • MySQL 5.0+

Related Links

Download URLs

License Version Download Size
Freeware Latest (mir) n/a
(Homepage | GitHub)