Quiz Website With Processwire

[Ghulam Mustafa]

Hi , greetings all..

Hope all are fine. Can we build a large quiz website containing thousands of quizzes on varried academic subjects. If yes, how it can done.

[da²]

Hello,

Don't consider my answer as the good answer, but I made a quick test to check if an idea could work ("reponses" should be named "answer", and "nouveau" => "add new"):

So I created this fields:

• answer: type=Text
• isGoodAnswer: type=Checkbox
• quizzAnswer: type=Repeater, content fields=answer, isGoodAnswer
• question: type=Text
• quizzEntry: Type=Repeater, content fields=question, quizzAnswer

Added the field quizzEntry to a template, and it looks it's working.

[bernhard]

1 hour ago, Ghulam Mustafa said:

Can we build a large quiz website containing thousands of quizzes on varried academic subjects.

The only one that can answer that question is you. It only depends on your skills. ProcessWire can likely handle that challenge easily.

1 hour ago, Ghulam Mustafa said:

If yes, how it can done.

What do you expect someone to answer to that question?

1 hour ago, da² said:

quizzAnswer: type=Repeater

My only advice for that project is NOT to use repeaters for questions, answers, whatever. Repeaters are tempting because you get some kind of easy UI for your data, but repeaters really don't scale well and they are a pain when it comes to aggregating data, which is likely an important requirement of such a project. It's much better to store everything in pages and create references via page reference fields. Then aggregating data is easy via RockFinder or findRaw().

Listing data is still a problem, but that can be done with a custom process module https://processwire.com/talk/topic/17709-how-to-create-custom-admin-pages-aka-processmodules-yes-its-that-simple/. You can use libraries like https://tabulator.info/ for listing data. It's more effort than using repeaters, but it's for sure better for UI/UX and you have a lot more possibilities to present your data.

If you don't want to build the last part on your own you can buy a license of RockGrid - it's not on my website yet but it will be soon and I can send it manually to anybody interested. This is how such a grid / table / lister could look like:

Instant sorting and filters. All the columns and buttons are totally up to you and added via JavaScript. Every row is a ProcessWire Page ?

 

[da²]

8 minutes ago, bernhard said:

My only advice for that project is NOT to use repeaters for questions, answers, whatever. Repeaters are tempting because you get some kind of easy UI for your data, but repeaters really don't scale well and they are a pain when it comes to aggregating data, which is likely an important requirement of such a project. It's much better to store everything in pages and create references via page reference fields

I never used repeaters so my knowledge is poor on this subject. But in my answer the goal is to create a single quiz per page (1000 quiz == 1000 pages with "quiz" template), do you think it's an issue doing that way? And why?

I'm interested in gathering informations on this subject, as it may be useful in the future. ?

[bernhard]

Well it always depends on the exact use case, so Repeaters might be a good option in one scenario or another. But the thing is that your example is very simplified and not the whole story ? Where would you store results for example? You could add another repeater for that, but then you have 3 levels of nesting and things get a nightmare if you want to retrieve data in an efficient way.

When working with repeaters from the API in regular pages it's simple to do this:

<?php
foreach($page->my_repeater as $answers) {
  echo $answer->user . " selected score " . $answer->score;
}

But how would you get all scores by user X and how would you efficiently aggregate that data and build an average for example?

These things are extremely efficient when done via SQL and are extremely expensive when done via PHP foreach ... And querying data from repeater pages is a pain. Or at least I don't know how to do it easily ? 

[da²]

If there are results to store, that's a whole question. ? I didn't think about that since OP question is a bit vague and we don't know if he needs that. And I was curious about testing repeaters. ?

Maybe store the results on the quiz page in a separate field (Profields Table ?), or a custom process module, or your RockGrid module. ^^

Since I bought Profields Table, I would try with it, I know it works with findRaw(). Adding a Table field on quiz template, columns would be "user | questionId | score".

I don't see a good way to do this with only core PW, but I don't know everything in PW.