We are pleased to announce Community Answers v4 release - a fully rewrite of the component. We redesigned the component with fully compatible with Joomla 3 features like Category API, Tags API and so on. Here are some of the important things:
Joomla 3 only:
This version is compatible with Joomla 3 only. If you are still using Joomla 2.5, please use Community Answers v3. When you are ready for Joomla 3, you can use the migration script of Community Answers to migrate your installation of Community Answers with one click.
Search Engine Friendly Urls:
Community Answers now generate more search engine friendly urls which includes the category aliases as well. No more redundant task names in urls. Further you can customize the urls by creating Category Menu items and remove unncessary ids of categories in urls. All your existing urls will gracefully moved to the new urls by sending 301 (permanantly moved) header to the search engines. So that you will not see any search engine errors with the url migration.
Microdata:
Community Answers adds necessary microdata elements to your questions which allows search engines to display special content from your pages. Microdata is a key in presenting better content through search engines.
New Category System:
Community Answers now uses Joomla Category API. It mean you can now make use of full Joomla ACL and other features of already familiar Joomla category system. All your categories will be migrated with the migration script provided. Go to Migrate page in your administrator site and click on migrate button.
New Tags System:
The tags now uses Joomla Tags API. This will allow you to make use of powerful tagging API of Joomla and can share your tags across the website, nest tags in other tags etc. Again, your existing tags will be automatically migrated to the new Tagging system by the migration script.
Email Templates:
Now you can customize your own email templates using your Joomla editor. Standard templates are provided for all events triggered by the component like new question, answer, comment, up/down vote etc.
No BBCode editor:
CA v4 supports your Joomla default editor only and will not bundle any third party BBCode editor. You can migrate all your BBCode content to HTML content using migration script automatically.
More Customization Options:
CA v4 now more customizable. You can find more customization options to design your own Q&A system. There are more ACL options provided as well. Now you can use different components to link your usernames as well as avatars.
CjForum Support:
We added CjForum support with this version. The integration is seemless and fully integrated into CjForum. For example, you can show questions in your CjForum user profiles, use avatars and profiles of CjForum in Community Answers - all with simple configuration options.
Redesigned Front-end:
The front-end pages are rewritten from the ground up and now uses sharable layouts for you to easily override without hacking the component code. We have redesigned the whole look and feel to make it look good besides performing well.
Question Comments & Ratings:
Now your users can up/down vote questions, comment on questions just like they do with answers.
So go ahead and start using all new Community Answers.