I’m quite impressed with my own progress today - with about 9 hours of proper, non-stop coding I’ve managed to make the interface, back-end and bits in between work to allow you to make your very own test.
Now there is one more thing for me to do, and that’s to do with the way questions are ordered, but otherwise it is totally ready for anyone to start making their tests.
So how is it working out so far?
The clever collapsing form
There are two problems when it comes to making the ‘new question’ form work well.
Firstly, there are three types of question, and one doesn’t require any answers (because it’s an open question), whereas the other two (multiple-choice) types need a set of options for the user to pick from.This means that for certain questions, a large part of the form isn’t required.
So using a nice drop-down box, you can select your question-type. Then the magical javascript kicks in. It thinks about what kind of form you need, and specifically if you need those answer inputs, and will show or remove them accordingly… with a simple but flashy effect!
So you can go from this:
to this:
where the answer bloat has been neatly tucked away.
What you’ve done so far
The second problem is that when you’re writing a test in this manner, and I’m speaking from experience, you really want to be able to see what you’ve already done. So using AJAX and a DIV which updates whenever a new question is added you can see all questions made in the current test so far.
Above the form your using to make the questions, too.
As a future consideration, I might split the page down the middle and have the form on the left and the questions so far on the right. I imagine that would be much easier to use, especially for those with large wide screens, but it does present problems for those on smaller resolutions. Perhaps CSS trickery could help - there is a technique going around at the moment which will switch style sheets based on resolution (not in Safari though :D).
Oh and as you can see from the screen shot above, the order of questions gets a bit mucked up when they’re made at the moment - but that won’ take two seconds to fix.
Well, there we have it. One day of work and, I think, my Buster Tests has come really far. I’ve already made a TODO list for tomorrow, which is going to start to take this app in some very interesting directions. Well, semi-interesting… lets just say cool. Yeah, that’ll do.