Category Archives: CalendarScripts

HOCK international: Case Study on the Flexibility and Customizability of Watu PRO

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Written By Kevin Hock, CFO of HOCK international

Watu Pro – An Easy Choice

HOCK international prepares candidates for professional accounting exams, and test banks are a critical tool in our study programs. With thousands of multiple-choice questions per exam, we needed a way to categorize, organize, and offer questions by topic to students.

While it can be difficult to evaluate and choose from the dozens of quiz plugins available for WordPress, Watu Pro has been a cornerstone of our learning management system since 2014. In this case study, I will explain how we chose Watu Pro, show some of what is possible using Watu Pro, and give examples of how easily it can be customized.

Powerful and Flexible Test Bank

Watu Pro’s question categories allow us to organize the questions in a way that mirrors the exam structure, and then offer questions to students in various combinations, including by topic, by Section, and from multiple Sections. Furthermore, Watu Pro’s ability to re-use questions from entire quizzes rather than just selecting specific questions is a powerful and unique feature, even among other quiz systems that claim to offer test bank capabilities.

The following screenshot shows how easily a student can pick questions to study from one or many topics (and see their current statistics):

Question Selection

Detailed Statistics

Students preparing for professional certifications want detailed statistics about their performance. Watu Pro’s database tables store every student response in any easy-to-understand layout, which is convenient for creating custom queries to show the students’ progress. Aggregate queries such as SUM, COUNT, and MAX can all be used to create performance metrics. By storing the results of such queries in the WordPress user metadata table, statistics can be displayed in dashboards created through page builders like Beaver Builder, as shown in the following screenshot.

MCQ Stats and charts

HOCK’s Customizations to Watu Pro

Beyond the built-in features, the modular design of Watu Pro allows PHP/MySQL programmers to easily edit the code. With only minimal modifications, we were able to add the following customizations:

  • Show bar graphs of topic-by-topic performance using the wpDataTables plugin.
  • Group incorrect answer choice explanations using expanders.
  • Display explanations for only a limited number of unanswered questions on each quiz.
  • Allow students to delete quizzes with a score under 25%.
  • Show the percent correct next to each topic in the question selection list.
  • Choose questions not yet answered correctly before repeating questions.
  • Sort “All of the above” and “None of the above” to always appear as the last answer choice, even with answer randomization.
  • Create reports for the percent of students who get each question correct on their first try to identify difficult or poorly-worded questions.

Extensive Visual Customization

Watu Pro uses CSS to control many aspects of the quiz layout. In the screenshots below, compare the standard Watu Pro layout to one of the layouts created by Watu’s designer to get an idea for how much the look and feel can be modified.

Default Layout

default design example

Customized Layout

customized design example

The Watu Pro Advantage

Even when HOCK investigated commercial AI-driven learning systems, none of them could match the features offered by Watu Pro. Furthermore, being able to extend the capabilities of Watu Pro offers tremendous advantages over other quiz platforms. With the help of Watu Pro, HOCK has been able to offer a best-in-class learning experience for our students.

About HOCK international

Founded in 2000 by Brian Hock, HOCK international provides complete and affordable study materials for the Certified Management Accountant (CMA) and Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) exams. In addition to the robust test bank powered by Watu Pro, HOCK also offers detailed textbooks, multimedia classroom videos, and the best support and guarantees on the market.

Oddness in The WordPress Posts Loop and WP Query

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While working on the new version of Shortcode Revolution we faced a couple of confusing behaviors of WordPress functions. I’ll document them here and will keep adding such information. Hopefully it can help other developers and save them a lot of time and frustration.

Excluding posts from WP Query (using post__not_in)

There is a good comment here explaining that post__not_in wouldn’t work when used with post__in in the same query. This is a good note but our query did not include post__in and post__not_in was still simply ignored. I did not dig deep into the code to see why this happens – the conclusion was simply not to use it.

Here is an example how we get 3 random related posts in Shortcode Revolution:

$query = [];
// we add 1 to the default number of posts which is 3 or to the user-passed number or posts
$query['posts_per_page'] = (empty($atts['num']) or !is_numeric($atts['num'])) ? 4 : intval($atts['num']) + 1;       
$query['orderby'] = 'rand';

// getting the posts here
$wp_query = new WP_Query($query);
$posts = $wp_query->posts;

// now because this is "related posts" query, we don't want the current post to be repeated below it. So let's filter it out
// $post_id is a variable we have defined earlier in the shortcode and it contains the current post ID
// we are using array_filter with a closure here. You can do it inside a loop with a counter but this solution is more elegant
$posts = array_filter($posts, function($p) use($post_id) {				
  return ($p->ID != $post_id);					
});

// if the current post was not there we have one more than needed
if($query['posts_per_page'] < count($posts)) array_pop($posts);

 

So that’s it – you just get more posts than you need and then remove the unwanted ones in PHP.

Showing the excerpt outside of the post loop – get_the_excerpt

If you look at the documentation it sounds like you can call get_the_excerpt with any post ID and receive the excerpt for that post id. Good luck! You may get the proper excerpt (sometimes!) but won’t get the automatically generated “read more” link properly. The first version of our code was this and it did not work:

foreach($posts as $p):
   $background_image =  has_post_thumbnail( $p->ID )  ?  get_the_post_thumbnail_url($p->ID) : ''; 
   $excerpt = get_the_excerpt($p->ID);
.....

I intentionally did not use $posts as $post to avoid overriding the global $post variable but apparently this was wrong. Fortunately this comment gave me the hint how to fix it:

foreach($posts as $p):
   // yes, do override the global!
   $post = $p;
   // and you need to setup_postdata($post)
   setup_postdata($post);
   $background_image =  has_post_thumbnail( $p->ID )  ?  get_the_post_thumbnail_url($p->ID) : ''; 
   $excerpt = get_the_excerpt($p->ID);
......
endforeach;

And after the end of the loop don’t forget to reset the post data:

wp_reset_postdata();

 

Shortcode Revolution for WordPress

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During our work on various WordPress installations I have figured out that we repeatedly create (oh well, kind of copy/paste) layout elements, dynamic stuff like lightboxes and sliders, pieces of code in custom plugins, and so on.

Some of these codes slowly turned into a library so we decided to go ahead and package them into a new free plugin called Shortcode Revolution. (You can check it at our site or directly at the WordPress repo)

This is just a very first version so there is hopefully a lot more to come. But let’s have a brief look at what’s available:

Posts, Related Posts, and Comments

UI for posts / comments shortcode

This allows you to create widgets that contain posts related to a topic, searched by ID or tag, related to the currently shown post, and so on.

There are 3 handy layout modes: simple list, default (with a thumbnail and excerpt), and a carousel / slider.

And above this paragraph you see a slider / carousel of 3 posts related to this one.

Popup / Lightbox

modal box UI

This is such a frequent task, and this plugin really makes it easy. Just enter your contents, some clickable text and probably some custom CSS classes. Voila, the popup is created.

Click me!

Columns and Grids

Columns / Grids UI

I mean, it’s typical that the content on the web normally just stays in one column. But who said it should always be that?

Do you remember newsletters? I hope our readers are not all that young. Newsletters (the paper ones!) typically have content flowing in multuple columns. That’s not typical for the web not because it’s bad but because it was hard thing to do in the past.

Now with the new CSS techniques it’s not that hard. But you don’t always want to write CSS especially when you are writing a blog post, do you? This is where the columns shortcode comes handy!

The shortcode also allows you to create a grid. In the grid the content does not flow in the columns. Instead, each piece stays in its own grid cell. Like this:

Hey, I’m the first item

And I am number two

They can all be different

And can contain images (look right)

Chart from a personality quiz

This at left is from our quiz plugin WatuPRO

Third line, item 1

And number two

The ninth item goes here

Tabs

Tabs UI

Tabs allow you to place content within, well, tabs. What does it mean? Look at this:

As I told you, you can  arrange content in tabs 🙂 Just click on one of these tabs and you’ll see the content related to each one.
just a chartLet’s just have a chart here to look smart.

Buttons

Create buttons UI

There isn’t so much to explain here. You get an easy to use UI to create all kind of buttons.

Tables

create tables from CSV

This one is super simple – it creates table from an uploaded CSV file. Technically you can use a remove or a dynamic CSV as well – just replace the uploaded file URL with the remote one.

Tables aren’t that much fascinating – I am sure you have seem some! So no demo for this shortcode.

Flashcards / Flipcards

Create flashcard shortcodes

There cards have a front and a back side and reveal the back when the user clicks on them. Simple:

Here’s a Math task:

2 + 2*3?

Of course it’s 8 because multiplication has a higher priority than addition 🙂

Who is she?

Adriana Lima

You can even combine shortcodes together like I did above. I placed two flashcard shortcodes in a grid so they can be side by side.

Data Shortcodes

creating a data shortcode

They are excellent for creating profile pages in communities, author pages, widgets containing some user data, and so on.

Custom Shortcodes

Just any content that you may want in many places on your site. Custom HTML, shortcodes, media, formulas, whatever. Easily repeatable and editable in one place.

Enjoy the plugin – it’s free and can save you many hours of work. Let us know your feedback, feature requests, and bug reports (yes, even bug reports!).