First of all, you can check the system as expert or as a regular forum user. For that you can visit the forum using the following user accounts:

Question authors:

hugo

rick

jimmy

Password for each user: 123

You can find all useful links at the top menu of the site:

• CM Answers Demo – Introduction – Link to the current guide.
• Forum – Link to the forum itself.
• Experts Dashboard – Link to the dashboard which can be used by question authors, experts and admin.

Forum

To test forum, head to the relevant page. At the top you can find the form for asking questions. The forum user add a question, its description, choose a category and assign a question to a certain expert.

After the user clicks Add Question, he will be redirected to the checkout. The question will be published after the payment. Our plugin supports either EDD or WooCommerce. We use EDD for this demo. The payment is set to the test mode.

Question Author / Expert / Admin Dashboard

The Experts Dashboard can be used by all types of users – question authors, experts and admin. It is similar for each type of user, the difference in tabs and their content. It allows to track questions, info about categories and experts, and edit profile.

On the question page, experts can edit questions, answers and comments by clicking on the relevant button.

Statistics

As an admin, you can find the Statistics page on the back-end. You can track all open and closed questions per each expert.

The expert can track his opened and closed tickets as well in the tab My Statistics on the front-end in the expert dashboard. 

Assigning experts to categories

As an admin, you can set certain users as experts for any category. In can be done on the Categories and Experts page, either when creating a category, or while editing it.

Testing Emails

When testing the plugin, you can check which emails are sent to which users. You can use for that the plugin WP Mail Logging which is installed on the current site.

Plugin Settings

Let’s go through some plugin settings.

Ask the Expert Add-on Settings

We will start from the settings of the Ask the Expert add-on. To find them, as an admin navigate to CM Answers Pro → Settings → Experts Addon. There are a few sections with options.

General

First section is General. We will consider a few options which are crucial for your use case.

• Allow experts and admin to modify questions – This option allows admins and experts to edit on the front-end questions / answers / comments asked by regular user.
• Allow mark public visible only resolved questions – The question can not be switched to the “Public” status until it is marked as “Resolved” by the question author, expert or admin. After it is marked as resolved, there can not be posted any answers under this question.
• Show answer author if it was added by expert – The plugin allows to hide all info about forum users. But if it is configured like this and you want to display the info about experts, you can enable the current option.
• Show experts statistics on the frontend – Enable this option to show the tab “My Statistics” in the Expert Dashboard.

There’s also one option at the top, which is optional for you use case, but it’s worth mentioning:

• Show unanswered questions only to experts – While this option is enabled, the question will not be visible to regular users until there’s at least 1 answer (even if the question has a “Public” status. As we added some new options that affect the question visibilty, this option can do the following – if it is enabled, the question author can not add any answers to his question until the expert answers it. If the option is disabled, the question author can add addition answers under his question even before the expert answers it. Also, if the expert didn’t answer the question, but marked it as resolved and switched the question status to “Public”, the question will not be visible to regular users, as it doesn’t have any answers.

Question Form

Next section is Question Form. Here are a few options that we will consider:

• Default question visibility and Allow to change the question visibility – We configured these 2 options in the way so when the forum user posts a question, it can not be published as “Public” question, and can be visible only to experts and admin.
• Allow user to assign a question to specific expert – While this option is enabled, when the user chooses a question category, he is able to choose an expert for answering the question.
• Allow experts to resolve questions – While this option is enabled, the experts are allowed to mark questions as “Resolved”, consequently, the expert will be able to switch the question to the “Public” status.

Dashboard

There is also a section Dashboard. There are 3 options which allow you to configure the dashboard colors – background, tab and active tab.

Main Plugin Settings

Now we will go through some of the settings of the main plugin.

Appearance Settings

Under the Appearance tab, you can find the section Table of questions. There is an option Show information about the author of a question. We disabled it, so the author info will not be displayed on the index page of the forum.

And under the section Thread page there are 3 similar options:

• Show question author
• Show answer author
• Show comment author

These settings relate to the appearance of the author info on the question page.

Moderation Settings

Under the Access and moderation tab, you can find the section Moderation. There is an option Limit of answers/comments by user. For the current demo we set the value “3”, so each user can not post more 3 answers and comments in total under each question.

Notification Settings

Under the Notifications tab, we will consider 2 sections.

New questions

Under the section New questions, you can choose, who should recieve email notifications – admin, question author and experts. For experts you can choose if to notify all experts of the category, or only assigned expert. Below you can configure email templates – one for the question author, and one for the admin and experts. Each email template supports placeholders, which allow to include such kind of information as a link to the question, and other.

New answers

You can find similar options under the section New answers. You can choose who should receive email notifications and configure email templates.