WatuPRO 3.9 and Affiliate Program

Leave a reply

Watu Pro has been updated to version 3.9. Full changelog:

New and improved features:

  1. Advanced configutration for power users (Intelligence module): a new “Advanced” link into the Edit Exam form takes you to additional form which lets you fine-tune the quiz further: tune correct/incorrect checkmarks at the final screen, randomize different number of questions in different categories, control the paginator colors and so on.
  2. Optional shareable URL of the quiz results (the “FInal screen”) so users can share their results on Facebook and other social networks. (More info)
  3. Survey questions – these are not counted in results and reports and not marked as correct or incorrect.
  4. Elaborated answer explanation / feedback – you can now show different content if the user answered correctly or not, or even show different feedback based on every single answer they have selected.
  5. Optional “Save” button for logged in users (except on “one page per question” quizzes where saving is automatically enabled).
  6. Set friendlier email sender name for automated emails without installing more plugins.
  7. Filter exam results by user group.
  8. Added new filters for easier customization (check the API)

Bug fixes:

  1. Fixed paginator issues
  2. Fixed timer and paginator overlap on some screens
  3. Improved animated scrolling on next/prev button so it happens only when necessary
  4. Fixed issue with sortable questions on mobile devices (Intelligence module)
  5. fixed problem with apostrophes on “Fill the gaps” questions (Intelligence module)
  6. Fixed problem with missing answers when a question is edited and at the same time there is an user returning to finish a quiz
  7. Fixed bug with category grade description
  8. Fixed bug with sortable questions when the quiz reuses them from other quiz
  9. Fixed problem with login URLs on some installations

As usual the upgrade will be sent by a newsletter to eligible customers. If your order is older than 1 year you can renew your 1 year cycle of free support and upgrades for only 40% of the current product price.

Affiliate Program

We have revived our affiliate program through Clickbank. You can earn 30% of all Watu PRO sales that you refer, and 30% – 35% on sales of our other products. To get your affiliate link please check this page.

Shareable Final Screen URL in WatuPRO

Leave a reply

From version 3.8.8 WatuPRO supports a shareable URL of the “Final screen”. This is the screen that is shown to the user when they complete the quiz – the actual quiz results.

From version 3.8.8 you can optionally enable public URL that the user can share with friends and on social networks.

How To Do It

Just above the “Final screen” text box there is a checkbox saying “Enable individual shareable URL of the final screen”. If you check it, the URL will be enable but nothing will change to the end user by default. You need either to use the variable shown under the checkbox to display the link on their final screen, or automatically redirect to it.

Why Redirect To The URL?

Redirecting to the final screen URL can be very useful for several reasons:

  • Tech-savvy users can copy it and place it on their blog or social networks themselves
  • All social-sharing plugins that you have installed should automatically work and share this individual URL. This way just any user can share their quiz results and bring more traffic to your site.
  • By default WatuPro loads the quiz results by AJAX. This is very fancy and on long quizzes you see that nice animation effect. However it has a downside – some complex scrips will not work inside AJAX-called blocks. So some users were unable to use some contact form plugins or other sharing plugins on the quiz results page. Now with the automatic redirection this problem no more exists.

Remember, the setting is entirely optional. If you don’t want the quiz results of any user to be public, just don’t enable the shareable URL.

Also pay attention what shortcodes you are using in the final screen / quiz results page. If you are using shortcodes to greet the logged in user by name (let’s call him Joe), the page may look odd to a non-logged in guest when looking at Joe’s results.

Why Drupal Will Never Be as Popular as WordPress

3 Replies

I don’t hate Drupal. I admit I don’t like it too much but this is not the point of the post. The point is not to bash Drupal vs WordPress. It’s only to explain why it will be never as popular. If you plan to invest in Drupal for your new site, or in creating Drupal extensions for sale, or to grow a career in Drupal development, and so on, popularity is important thing to consider.

WordPress is growing and will keep growing. Drupal – and Joomla by the way – had their pick in 2009 and since then are in almost constant decline. Why is this?

WordPress is Already Insanely Popular

What an argument is this? A good one actually. Until something major changes, the popularity of one CMS guarantees its further popularity. Because when you ask a random fellow what CMS to use, chances that you’ll get the answer “WordPress” are 4-5 times better in favor of WP vs Drupal.

When Someone Says, "It isn't a popularity contest."

WordPress is not just popular – its popularity is absolutely huge and probably unseen so far in the CMS world. If you have to bet which will be the most known CMS in 5 years from now what will be your bet?

Drupal Is Less Developer-Friendly

I expect to get some hate for this but it’s what I think. Some bloggers say that Drupal is developer-friendly because of… I could never understand what. If you want to publish a Drupal extension you have to follow their coding style (to the level of where curly braces are placed) and you have to use their APIs even when you have easier ways to do things.

Insisting on good coding style is probably good. But how is this developer friendly and how is this strictness going to attract more developers to build extensions for Drupal? Don’t forget we are discussing the things entirely from popularity point of view here.

Drupal Is More Complicated and Harder To Work With

I guess everyone agrees here. While the complication probably makes Drupal more powerful it comes with the cost of ease of use. And since most webmasters don’t need all the power anyway, guess who will keep getting more users long term.

Drupal Uses More Server Resources

This is hard to argue if you have ever tried Drupal and WordPress. Since the number of webmasters who use shared hosting is much bigger than these who run their own servers it’s wise to expect that more of them will keep choosing WordPress.

WordPress Has a Free Hosted Service

The popularity of the free blog hosting wordpress.com can hardly be beaten by anyone at the moment. Maybe Blogger and Tumblr have more users. But not Drupal for sure. The hosted version of WordPress attracts more interest to the whole WordPress ecosystem.

Drupal Has Less Extensions

There are WordPress plugins for almost everything you can imagine. Moreover, there are plenty of great commercial plugins that are well maintained and supported. Drupal also has a large repository but being less friendly to commercial plugin developers the amount of work that goes into maintaining good extensions is less.

And exactly the addons are what make one system popular or not. There are probably better blogging platforms than WordPress, but the whole ecosystem it has is hard to beat.

More Affordable Developers Are Available For WordPress Projects

If you are running a site and need customization chances are your project will be much more affordable with WordPress than with Drupal. Most Drupal developers are good programmers and charge a lot. This is because of the steep learning curve with Drupal.

On the other hand there is the whole range of WordPress developers – from the really expensive genius to the average Joe who is still good enough to make a lot of things. Competition is dense, prices are better for the buyers.

WordPress is Easier to Design

I have no idea why some bloggers say that a WordPress site is not easy to design. The themes are just HTML with PHP inside and it’s very easy to modify the setup. It’s also very easy to extend your theme with additional functions. Not greatly structured code, I agree, but quite easy for everyone who knows PHP to work with. WordPress offers enough flexibility to create any type of site layout and there are many examples of sites that don’t look like blogs (and you’ll hardly recognize that they use WordPress).

Add to this the fact that there are thousands of high quality WordPress themes for few bucks. On sites like TemplateMonster, Themeforest, Mojo Themes, and many others you can find theme for every site.

The popularity game is clearly won by WordPress and will continue to be so. I don’t know which is the best CMS or whether Drupal is better than WordPress. Most popular doesn’t always equal best. I know however who is going to keep the number one place in the popularity contest. This is WordPress.