We have unofficially launched a new plugin called FAQ Builder for Wordpress. Please go check it out and share with all your friends.

FAQ Builder for Wordpress is a great way to add and manage Frequently Asked Questions on your Wordpress blog. It provides a convenient way for your readers to submit questions, and a handy administration tool that allows you to add, edit, and answer questions for posting to your site. FAQs can be assigned to categories, and you can define which questions appear on your FAQ page, which questions are available in the handy search tool (but not displayed), and which questions you’d rather not present to the public at all.

You can download FAQ Builder for Wordpress right now from our site. We have presented it to the great folks at Wordpress for inclusion in the Wordpress Plugins Directory and we are awaiting their reply.

UPDATE: We have been accepted into the Wordpress Plugin Directory!

FAQ Builder is the latest of three terrific plugins from Square Compass.

Business Directory for Wordpress
Quick Contact for Wordpress
FAQ Builder for Wordpress

You asked, we listened; thanks for all the feedback and friendly pleas.

You should be able to find it in your Admin control panel as an automatic upgrade option. If not, please follow the trail to the right and download from Wordpress.

The details, in only slightly more detail:

1. Compatability with all characters except “\” and multiple quotes (i.e. “”). You want to add special characters; have a ball.
2. PHP Short Tags have been removed. This should help with some of the operational problems we have been hearing about. At least we hope so.
3. Increased data handling validation, which we hope will clear up some of those random AJAX errors.
4. We also took the time to make a few minor adjustments and tweaks while we were under the hood. We even fixed a spelling error for those of you who noticed.

Thanks to Jesse for getting it all worked out, and thanks to all those who kindly nudged us into submission; your special characters have been restored.

From now on, please make comments here in our blog.

We are doing this for a number of reasons, primarily to help reduce the amount of time and impact our feeble customer service effort requires of us.

We try to keep up with things, and make a somewhat regular effort to respond, reply, and even develop new versions. However the forum has become a breeding ground for negative comments regarding our inability to spend extra time on the site rather than an interactive forum for community support. Moderating the forum was taking an extra amount of time that we just don’t have, and obviously became a source of frustration for many of you. My apologies to any of you who are offended by this action; I simply cannot keep up and have determined that it is best not to allow a handful of complainers to dwell on this fact and ruin an otherwise great experience for the rest of us.

We started this open source project as an experiment to learn more about the open source community, to participate with what we think is a wonderful utility, and to give back to a community that has given us so much. We are overjoyed at the positive response we have received and thank you all for participating with us. We’ll keep working on better versions as we move forward.

At the same time, we have been flabbergasted at the mean and demanding tone of a few commenters. Gratefully we have only had a small handful of these experiences. I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of a few important factors that dictate the time and effort we can spend on this project:

1. It’s free. We’ll continue to provide a free version of this, but until it becomes a source of more than a handful of donations, we still have to focus on our revenue so that we can feed our children and go to an occasional movie.
2. Hobby priority. We love working on this project, but because love doesn’t pay the bills, we have to prioritize this among other things that we love, but that don’t bring in revenue. This includes wives, children, cycling, trips to the aquarium and a few other pet projects. We have a lot going on.
3. Simple Support Structure. We designed BizDir to be as simple as possible so that it wouldn’t require a huge support effort. We thrive on customer feedback and requests, and hope that what we provide will work for anyone interested, however we are not able to test for every possible scenario and often can’t afford the many hours it takes to make this work for your custom install of alien technology. We have designed this to work with most standard configurations; please go easy on us if it isn’t working for you, and especially if you are trying to wedge this into something that is ‘out of the ordinary’.

If you have feedback for us, we want to hear it. Please response to one of our blog postings, or send us a note in our feedback form.

As stated, we accept praise, advice, and even criticism, though we do appreciate you being nice about it.

Sincerely: Thank you.

—Cary and Jesse and the rest of our Square Compass Team

Business Directory for Wordpress v0.8.2 Beta

Thank you for being patient, and thank you for your comments and feedback.

We have finished our testing and have released v0.8.2 Beta, which should be in your Wordpress Auto Updater in your Plugins Admin. If not, you can download it from the Business Directory for Wordpress download page.

We discovered that under certain conditions our plugin was effected by a known Microsoft IE Bug. We were able to make the necessary changes and as far as we can tell we have things working for all environments.

My apologies for not catching this in the earlier version; we are Mac heads and scrimped on the Windows testing on the first go-around. Even if we were Windows users, however, we would still be using Firefox, and recommend it to everyone we meet. Nevertheless; we acknowledge that much of our world must be filtered through IE, and so we have expended a few more days to make the appropriate accommodations.

Let us know what you think in our comments. Rate our plugin when you have a second, and tell all your friends about us.

Oh, and don’t forget that we are running on SpareWare; if you like what we have done and want to support us, send us your spare change.

*Please do not comment on our inability to produce actual clever graphics; We know. 

Here’s the scoop:

v0.8.1 includes new updates to enhance the security of the plugin. We used an older Wordpress standard in the original code and took the time to update the security this week to make sure we are protected against SQL injections. It looks like we have improved the security considerably.

We are currently working on a javascript error that our research indicates is a known Microsoft bug. There are some workarounds that we are incorporating and are confident we can get things working. This will help with the pull down menu, and specifically the issue where the new categories are not functioning correctly for some of you.

We plan to have the update posted in the next day or two.

FYI: The Microsoft bug that we are dealing with is discussed here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/276228

We are proud to release Business Directory for Wordpress v0.8 Beta. It has been submitted to the gods at Wordpress and should appear in your auto-update soon. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown on what you will see, namely: Categories!

New in This Version

1. Added Categories: you can now create your own categories, assign listings to categories, sign up into a category, and search by category.
2. Fixed Bugs: We fixed a few issues that were troubling some of you, and found a few items that we improved under the hood.

This version is a little more stable, and sets the stage for future development of some nifty features that will let you take advantage of categories.

Upgrading Instructions For Current Users

1. Back up your database.
2. Seriously; while we are pretty confident in our stuff, we don’t want to be responsible for ruining yours. Back that thing up.
3. Deactivate your current version of BizDir from within your Plugins Admin.
4. Upload or Auto-update the new version 0.8 Beta.
5. Reactivate BizDir.
6. Add categories, assign categories, tell all your friends.
7. Seriously; tell all your friends.

New users can simply add the new plugin as you normally would, though we still recommend the back up.

Here are some screen shots for you…

^On your Business Directory page you will now have the ability to search for categories. This is a great feature for now, and sets up the ability in future versions to create separate pages in your blog for each category. Stay tuned…

^In your Sign Up page you will notice a new field for Category. Your visitors are required to select a category before their submission will be accepted. This assures that all new sign ups are assigned to a category. You can name your own categories in the BizDir Admin panel.

^In your BizDir admin panel, you can assign or change categories for your users before or after you approve them.

^In the BizDir admin panel you now have the ability to add as many categories as you want. We create a category called ‘General’ for you, and assign all your existing listings into that category when you upgrade or install this new version. You have the ability to change the name of the General category, or can delete it. Note that your visitors will not be able to submit a listing unless there is a category for them to choose, so make sure you always have a category in there.

WARNING: Deleting a category will ALSO delete all the listings in that category. We warn you about this before we allow you to go through with it, but it is a good think to think about before you go deleting all your categories and flush your listings along with them. To avoid this, simply re-assign all the listings in a particular category to a new category. We’ll tell you how many listings are left in a category before you delete it, so you can be assured that you have cleared everyone out.

Did I mention backing up your database before doing any of this is a good idea?

We are planning to post before noon, Tomorrow. I’ll let you know if we have to change this, but I am pretty confident we are ‘there’.

We are being a little overly concerned about this particular update because we are adding some new database components and we need to make sure things are stable before we release this to the wild.

While are are pretty pleased with the stability, we will request that you BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE INSTALLING THE NEW VERSION. Just in case. Most of you will want to use PHPMyAdmin to do the backup. See these instructions on how to back up your database.

See you tomorrow!

A quick note before we do: Some of you are having problems with the display, and a few are having problems with the forms not working. We are working on some bugs that may fix this for future installations. However, if you are currently having trouble with the plugin, you may want to try this:

1. Back up your database
2. Back up the ‘wp_biz_listings’ table, separately
3. Deactivate the Business Directory plugin
4. Delete the ‘wp_biz_listings’ table, specifically
5. Reactivate the Business Directory plugin
6. Import the wp_biz_listings’ info from your backup

This should get you up and running again. Note two things:

1. Our objective here is to delete the specific BizDir database table, and then to restore it. Backing up your data will allow you to try this without loosing your current listings. However, if you have been unable to create any listings, the backing up in step two is not necessary. We do want you to backup your entire database, however, just to be safe.
2. If you are an advanced user, you may have changed the name of the table. ‘wp’ is the default prefix for Wordpress, and the table we want to work with should be named with this prefix. But it might not be. This will likely only effect those of you who like to tinker with this stuff, and you already know this.

We are working out a few last bugs and testing, and have decided to add a necessary feature that requires you to delete or change your listings in a particular category before it lets you delete the category (just to be safe). We should be seeing this live in a few hours.

We have developed a new version that includes the ability to add categories to your Directory. We have a few finishing touches to perform before we post it, and need to test for the latest version of Wordpress. We hope to have this up by the end of August. We’re trying to catch up; sorry again for the lack of communication and silence.

Thanks for all the great comments, suggestions and ideas.

This new version fixes a bug in the installation process that was causing an error in the database creation process. The restulting functional error was that you could not save a Directory Listing to the database.

In this new version, we are correctly installing the database, and updating items upon activation.

The new version is available for download from the Wordpress plugin directory (for newcomers, click in the upper right of this page) and via your plugin auto update in your Wordpress plugin admin panel.

We are planning to jump from ‘beta’ to a ‘release’ version in our next revision. Functionally this does not mean much more than ‘we think we have the bugs worked out’. Our Big Kahuna pro version update is still in the mill, and we hope to have something out on the streets by Spring. …of 2009.

Thanks for being with us. Let us know how it goes.