WPSkillz is my attempt at creating a smartly-designed and usable skills-testing plugin for WordPress.

Design Considerations:

I built this with several primary considerations in mind:

• Extensibility - The simple multiple choice questions can only go so far in determining expertise. So, while I started with traditional multiple-choice questions as the first step in this plugin, I built out the WP_Skillz_Question class with the intention that it could be extended by other classes to offer different types of questions, appropriate for different types of tests.

• Teachability - While I love testing my knowledge on quizzes and skills tests, I often feel like its a waste of time if the question doesn't at least teach me something new if I happen to get it wrong. Too many questions involve judgement calls on the test writer's part, and if I'm told that my answer is wrong, I want to know why, so that I can research it and dispute the question if necessary.

  So I included two features in this quiz toward that goal:

  • Each question in the WP_Skillz_Question_MultiChoice class has an 'explanation' field, to be displayed on an incorrect guess. In addition, there should also be space to enter separate explanations (not implemented here) for each of the incorrect answers, to explain exactly why they are wrong.

  • Question Review - This is the killer feature that sites like smarterer.com get right and most traditional quiz plugins fail at; letting users rank questions, edit them if necessary, and add new questions. Otherwise the test grows stale rapidly, and poorly-worded questions remain as a drag on the curve. The test becomes a judge of people's ability to parse confusingly-worded questions rather than expertise in the subject matter.

    I didn't get this working, yet, though I came up with a simpler compromise - enabling comments on questions, but hiding them until the user has answered the question. This way there can at least be some back and forth on questions.

• Editability - After some hesitation, I decided to make Stack Overflow-flavored Markdown the default editor style. This has the benefit of speed in editing, familiarity, and ease of deployment - Markdown editors are lightweight, can be deployed on the front end as well as the administrative screens, and do not have issues being used in meta boxes like the wp_editor() function does.

  I know there are a few drawbacks: for a quiz which is specifically testing WordPress knowledge, it is a shame not to use as much of WordPress's standard API as possible. But I thought the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. And if not, its fairly easy to build another question class type that registers different meta boxes on the post.php screen.

The WordPress Way

I tried to build the plugin with the guiding principle of doing things "the WordPress way". Not the simplest way to do them inside WordPress, or the way that a tutorial explaining how to achieve this functionality inside WordPress would explain, but the way that these functions would look if they were hashed out by core developers for inclusion into WP core functionality. This was something of a thought experiment for me: a lot of the choices I ended up making as far as object-oriented programming don't really make much sense on their own, but I tried to imagine what a "skills test API" would look like in WordPress, given the recent move toward adding classes and eschewing globals.

Obviously this approach - creating a class which doesn't interact with the built-in objects in WordPress - is less than ideal. If the core development continues in the direction that a lot of discussions seem to be heading, in particular the discussions about creating a generic WP_Object class, then WPSkillz_Question is well suited to extend upon that. But for now... not so much.

Live Demo:

Live plugin demo populated with sample questions is online at wpskillz.com. Try your hand - registration is open and scores will be tallied!