As you may notice, a new section in the website has taken birth called the Support Forums. These forums have been created in the idea of easing communication between the website’s visitors and to offer a more efficient way for theme users to receive support. Hope to have a constructive community grow up at the forums.
Since I released my first WordPress theme, Cover WP, I’ve been getting a lot of support questions in the comment section of the theme’s page or by email. While these were good places to come back for answers, the possibilities to offer support was limited: not all content could be added, there was no subscription option and following up a request was hard. As I was getting more of these requests, I felt a way to ease the communication with the theme users was needed and a support forum would be the best option at this point.
Anybody can read the forum but to post you need to create an account. It’s easy and takes just one step.
The forum covers several areas, with a section dedicated to Theme Support with subsections for each theme. Please add your support questions related to one of my themes under the appropriate section. There is also a section dedicated to general, non-theme related discussions about WordPress.
I’ve been working at the forum for the last weeks, integrating it into the site’s design and adding features to create a good user experience from the beginning. The forum is powered by bbPress with functionality added mostly by plugins from bbShowcase. Read below to find out what features the forum offers and how it can help you:
Instant User Registration
Creating a new account requires only a user name and an email and you can choose your password at registration and you can access your account immediately. Your password is also sent to you by email.
Topic Statuses
To help sort existing topics and be able to find a solution for your problem fast if it has already been resolved, topic statuses can be set to either resolved or now resolved. Then you can search through the resolved ones to see if there’s already a solution to your problem or through the unresolved ones it you’re looking to offer help.
Topic Subscriptions
Now you can receive email notifications when a new reply has been added to a topic you subscribed to or if you don’t want to be notified by email you can just subscribe to the topic’s RSS feed.
BBcode Support
If you’re looking to post a support question you may need to add a link to your website, maybe add a screenshot or add some code. This has been made easy with BBcode formatting buttons that automatically insert the required tags.
User Quotations
The topics in the forum are not threaded, but to ease the discussion if you want to reply to a certain user you can quote the excerpt of text you’re referring to and then add your content.
I hope for this to be a big improvement for my website’ experience and for the relationships with the website’s users.
See you in the forum soon.