FAQMasterFlex Hosting: Compare Hosting

What is FAQMasterFlex Hosting?

Does your website need a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section? Don’t want to spend countless hours building the initial structure and updating it later? FAQMasterFlex allows you to quickly and easily manage FAQs on your website.

About FAQMasterFlex

FAQMasterFlex is a free open source Web application that uses PHP and a database to manage the FAQ section of your website. For people who only have a few FAQs, the time you spend downloading and installing the app on your hosting may not be worth it, but for larger entities with dozens of questions and answers to maintain, this is a viable solution.

The tool itself was originally created in late 2003 by a group called “Lethal Penguin” – the tool has continued to evolve until around 2008, but not much support has existed after that. If you are going to setup a site that uses FAQMasterFlex, expect to wrestle with a lot of problems with compatibility with newer browsers and versions of PHP.

Features Summary

The application itself has the capability of supporting unlimited categories and questions, so long as there exists a MySQL data layer to support that. The application might be considered more of a script than a platform. It can be used in conjunction with other PHP applications, although there will of course be challenges getting it to work with newer versions of PHP.

The FAQ itself is not responsive, but still interactive. Using PHP, each mini-quiz or FAQ exists as it’s own page, and the administrator has access to change the content on the FAQ without accessing the code. This is useful for non-developer who simply need a bare-bones Q&A page without needing to write any HTML. Moreover, the site is configured in a way that it becomes very easy to fit big FAQ pages into smaller page sub-sections.

There are very few active demos available on the web today to showcase how the script works. In fact, most of the information available about this script can only be found by searching through extinct sites on the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine.

Installing FAQMasterFlex

Using the script is simple. Log in to the password-protected administration area, create categories for your FAQs, and then fill in the form with both the questions and the answers. Visitors can then click on a category to see all the questions, and then click on the question to see the answer. For this to function, the visitor’s browser must have Javascript enabled. You are free to add, change, and delete questions and answers as you see fit.

Some CPanel web-hosts still have install scripts for this type of site though, so it can be used even if the codebase is no longer well supported.

Hosting

In theory, there is no limit on the number of questions and answers you can store. However, you need to make sure that if you’re using a shared hosting plan, you have enough storage capacity to handle the database. You’ll need a simple shared hosting plan that provides support for PHP and MySQL, as the FAQs will be stored in a MySQL database.

If you’re using a dedicated hosting plan, you may need to increase the storage space on your hard drive, if your FAQ library gets to be fairly large.

Your host’s script repository may have a one-click install option for FAQMasterFlex, but if they don’t, you can manually install it on your shared hosting plan, as long as you know how to set up your own MySQL database.

Alternatives to FAQMasterFlex

Just about any Content Management System (CMS) with extensible plugins, will have some sort of FAQ optimized plugin. Or the CMS might have dedicated themes which are pre-built for site administrators to have either a pure FAQ site, or a powerful FAQ page. Many plugins even have responsive “accordian” style answer dropdowns for each question. Similar Functioned WordPress Plugins

• Spider FAQ – has a built in category management and form creation tool geared towards making FAQs
• WP FAQ – Treats Questions and Answers each as separate taxonomies, like a post or a page.
• Quick and Easy FAQ – allows for deeply customized FAQ format and styling

Those are just a few examples among dozens of WordPress FAQ plugins. Similarly, Drupal, Magneto, Plone, and many .NET CMS platforms, all have similar plugins which can handle a similar FAQ style interaction. It is even possible to code an FAQ page directly with HTML, or a fancier interaction can be made with jQuery.

There are hundreds of examples on Github, and many of the CMS plugins are also open source and freely available. Many different platforms, no matter how small, have strengths which set them apart from their competitors. In the case of FAQMasterFlex, it is highly advised to use an alternative unless you are forced to use PHP 4.