Index Page Demo

How The Index Page Was Configured?

There are a few ways how the Index Page can be configured.

Default Index Page

First - when you install and activate the plugin, the index page is generated by default in 2 versions - with AJAX engine and without it. You can find permalinks to both of these pages in plugin settings:

The plugin has hundreds of options for customizing the appearance and behavior of the index page and questions pages, access and moderation settings, notifications and much more. The plugin is highly flexible to be applied according to your needs.

Custom Index Page

Another way - if you want to place your forum to another page, there are 2 base shortcodes for this:

You can check the full list of parameters in the screenshot below:

In our case we used the shortcode [сma-questions] and defined the following parameters: we enabled the navigation bar, AJAX engine, and limited displaying the number of questions by 10 items per page. So our shortcode looks like this:

[сma-questions navbar="1" ajax="1" limit="10"]

Displaying Certain Categories

As another example, we can display questions of a certain category with limited items per page, without question form, navigation bar and sorting bars, and with a category name next to the question title. We can place it right here using the following shortcode:

[сma-questions cat="36" limit="3" form="0" sortbar="0" navbar="0" categorybeforetitle="1"]

Widgets Area

The plugin provides its own widget area called CM Answers Sidebar.

It also provides a few widgets which allow to display items such as counters of published questions/answers/comments, login widget, the specified list of questions, related questions, popular tags and top contributors. You can see examples of a few widgets on that demo page.

AJAX

The CM Answers plugin supports the ability to use Ajax to display content. When set using a shortcode, the answer thread for a question will be show on the same page URL as the list of questions.

This has advantages related to load time and interaction and disadvantages when it comes to SEO. You can overcome the SEO issues by still keeping the auto generated question list page alive. This means that search engines will still index your sites questions while you can retain the Ajax based user interface.