/quizgen-prelims

Web application built in PHP to build, host, conduct and grade quizzes online.

Primary LanguagePHP

Quizgen - Prelims

  • Creating preliminary rounds for quizzes
  • Allowing multiple users to simultaneously attempt via a local network
  • Real-time grading and results display.

Uses a MySQL database to store questions in enciphered format; serves these questions to users and stores details and answers submitted by them; allows the administrator to check answers and post scores to a result display page that updates in realtime.

Installing

  • If you do not have MAMP/WAMP/LAMP installed, install that from here

  • Download this repository using the Clone or download -> Download ZIP option on the top right

  • Extract quizgen-prelims-master.zip and rename the directory so created to something more palatable, say prelims; open up the terminal and navigate to it

  • Move prelims to (typically) the htdocs folder of your server platform. This can usually be accomplished via terminal, like so :

mv Downloads/prelims /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/

  • Fire Apache & MySQL and navigate to phpMyAdmin - navigation instructions to this usually come bundled with the platform itself, so this should be easy to find

  • Once there, create a database named database and use the Import option to load into it the database.sql file located in the directory you moved to htdocs, i.e. prelims

  • That should be it for the setup. Based on your operating system and AMP platform, visit one of :

localhost:8888/prelims
localhost:80/prelims
localhost:8080/prelims
  • Make changes to the database and the code to replicate this for your own use

Features

A walkthrough for (mostly) everything that can be accomplished through this application can be found here

Note

  • Default credentials for administrator privileges are :
username : username
password : password

  • Admin accounts can only be added manually, via editing the sql file and providing an SHA1 hash as the password

  • The local result display page in its final form needs to be replicated online to publish results

  • Also, there can be better ways to package this application so that it does not require lengthy, manual installation steps - turning it into a Node/Express/MongoDB application is one

About

As is very evident, this was first built for Exun 2015 (to conduct paperless preliminary rounds for the quiz using tablets for all teams (provided by very generous sponsors)) - and was my first attempt at building something for the web, hence :

  • It uses the LAMP stack
  • Switches from functional to object oriented PHP midway
  • Could have been done with a tenth of the effort I ended up putting in

Nevertheless, it is very robust, secure and ran successfully for a 100+ team event (which means it survived ~200 self-certified hackers trying to mess around with it)

If you're trying to replicate this for your event and run into problems, please do hit me up.