QuizPlugin

One of the things that training design people tell us is that "it's good to checkpoint" during a training course with quiz questions. This is a little quiz formatter that lets us embed a quiz into the training in the wiki, as we develop it. Of course, you can use it for other things as well....

The sort of quizzes we need are simple; multiple choice, or questions answerable with a single string. This plugin allows us to design such simple quizzes in a TWiki topic (these are just examples; they don't work):

%QUIZ{"Why is the sea boiling hot?" type="select" choices="It isn't;Just because;42" correct="Just because"}%

%QUIZ{"Which of the following are English Counties?" type="select" choices="Peckham;Cheshire;Argyll;Wisconsin;Cornwall" correct="Cheshire;Cornwall"}%

%QUIZ{"How long is a yard?" type="string" correct="3.5 pints" jump="TWikiAccessControl"}%

Usage

%QUIZ{ " question " attributes }%

Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server where TWiki is running.

Like many other TWiki extensions, this module is shipped with a fully automatic installer script written using the BuildContrib.

• If you have TWiki 4.1 or later, you can install from the configure interface (Go to Plugins->Find More Extensions)
  • The webserver user has to have permission to write to all areas of your installation for this to work.
• If you have a permanent connection to the internet, you are recommended to use the automatic installer script
  • Just download the QuizPlugin_installer perl script and run it.
• Notes:
  • The installer script will:
    • Automatically resolve dependencies,
    • Copy files into the right places in your local install (even if you have renamed data directories),
    • check in new versions of any installed files that have existing RCS histories files in your existing install (such as topics).
    • If the $TWIKI_PACKAGES environment variable is set to point to a directory, the installer will try to get archives from there. Otherwise it will try to download from twiki.org or cpan.org, as appropriate.
    • (Developers only: the script will look for twikiplugins/QuizPlugin/QuizPlugin.tgz before downloading from TWiki.org)
  • If you don't have a permanent connection, you can still use the automatic installer, by downloading all required TWiki archives to a local directory.
    • Point the environment variable $TWIKI_PACKAGES to this directory, and the installer script will look there first for required TWiki packages.
      • $TWIKI_PACKAGES is actually a path; you can list several directories separated by :
    • If you are behind a firewall that blocks access to CPAN, you can build a local CPAN mini-mirror, as described at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/BuildingDakar#CPAN_local_minimirror
• If you don't want to use the installer script, or have problems on your platform (e.g. you don't have Perl 5.8), then you can still install manually:
  1. Download and unpack one of the .zip or .tgz archives to a temporary directory.
  2. Manually copy the contents across to the relevant places in your TWiki installation.
  3. Check in any installed files that have existing ,v files in your existing install (take care not to lock the files when you check in)
  4. Manually edit LocalSite.cfg to set any configuration variables.
  5. Run configure and enable the module, if it is a plugin.
  6. Repeat from step 1 for any missing dependencies.

If the plugin is installed, you will see a question here: %QUIZ{"Is the QuizPlugin installed and working?" type="select" choices="yes;no;maybe" correct="yes"}%

Plugin Info