Formspring.me? Maybe for others, but not for dot-me.
Have you seen formspring.me? It’s a sort of like a cross between a FAQ and a tumblog and an advice column. The concept is simple: people submit questions, and the formspring.me owner answers them, and it all gets published. It’s kinda nifty.
One big problem with this concept is that if you want it to work, you need to send people away from your website to use it. You don’t want to send people away from your site more than you have to, right? Right. So instead of using their service, roll your own. I call it a “fauxspring”, because I’m hopelessly witty.
It’s pretty simple to make your own Fauxspring using WordPress. If you check out my personal blog, you’ll see a fauxspring link in my sidebar. You click that, and it takes you to a wordpress page with a cforms form on it. The form is set up to be super-simple, just a name and a note field, and neither is required. If you’re concerned about spam, you can add a captcha or hidden fields or something, and Dani can tell you more about that in a later post. It’s just a super-simple place for people to come and submit stuff to you with.
So you’ve got your page up and running, and people are asking questions. Great! Take those questions out of your email and put them in posts and answer them. I know it’s not automatic, but it’s simple, and if you call it “oldschool” you’ll earn hipster points. When you post your questions and answers, give them a category. You’ll see I have a category “Fauxspring” on my blog, and that’s what I assign fauxspring submission posts. With that category link, you now have a direct link to all your fauxspring answers, and you can stick that link wherever you like.
With that, you’re done the important parts. But, say your theme’s category pages aren’t displaying your answers the way you would like? Category and archive pages can sometimes be coded very weirdly, and I ran into that with my theme. If you go to my site and look at the Fauxspring category, you’ll see it looks very different from other categories. The solution is found with Category Templates.
WordPress.org has all the information you need about category templates, but here’s the short version of what I did: Since I’m running WordPress 2.9.x, I went into my theme folder and created a category slug theme template, category-fauxspring.php, and please allow me a moment to say just how much I love the new option to use category slugs instead of category IDs. Love love love. Then, I copied all the code from my theme’s index.php into the category template, and removed bits and moved around bobs until I was satisfied with how it looked. So now, when you click on the Fauxspring category link, it has its own custom display that’s a little more in line with this sort of post. Nifty, huh?
So now all that’s left is adding all the appropriate links to your site and telling all your friends. Have fun!
Mer made this mess on January 4th, 2010 and filed it under WordPress