New Maintainer for WP Pro Quiz

  • As you may have seen from the notice on the WP Pro Quiz plugin page WP Pro Quiz has not been updated in over 2-years, and may not be compatible with current versions of WordPress. It would seem many sites are still running WP Pro Quiz successfully, which is a testament to both WP itself and the plugin in that it continues to work after so long.

    I first started working with WP Pro Quiz in 2015 when a client asked me to build a new feature, the display of quiz history and stats for users. This led to the release of WP Pro Quiz Completed, an extension that we still sell at goldhat.ca today. At that time we had plans to release many more extensions, such as the often sought after “PDF Certificates” feature. But to do that we needed hooks (actions and filters) put into WP Pro Quiz. So we reached out to Julius Fischer, via support tickets, GitHub and eventually his own website. We tried 9-times over several months, with no response at all. We wish him well and have no idea what the story is, why the plugin was abandoned despite being #1 by a large margin in the quiz category. Hopefully he is alive and well, and personally I speculated that he chose to leave the project behind because of the tremendous cost of delivering support and little revenue from donations or service work. Whatever the case our goal to build extensions for WP Pro Quiz and sell them, ran into a brick wall. But we still had clients who wanted to see WP Pro Quiz improved or rebuilt, and that led to us forking WP Pro Quiz and doing a significant rebuild as QuizMaster.

    While QuizMaster is an extension-based system, and has a utility for migration from WP Pro Quiz (QuizMaster Migrate) both of which are free and hosted here at www.ads-software.com, we recognize some sites will be unable to make the switch. It could be because of a lot of custom code that relies on WP Pro Quiz tables, or features that are in WP Pro Quiz which we had to strip away when building QuizMaster as a lighter-weight, more extendable system. For this reason, and because we still see value in building extensions for WP Pro Quiz, our firm (GoldHat Group) is in the process of applying to become the new maintainer of WP Pro Quiz. Under the www.ads-software.com policy on transferring existing projects, we are submitting a version we’re adapting as WP Pro Quiz 2.

    For all those developers out there that have worked with WP Pro Quiz before and perhaps fixed bugs, or added/improved features, we’d like to call on you now to submit your changes as pushes on GitHub, at the WP Pro Quiz 2 repo: https://github.com/goldhat/wp-pro-quiz-2

    This process of transferring management of a plugin takes time, we still have several weeks of work to do on WP Pro Quiz 2 before it is ready for review by the WP Plugin Review team. The original developer must be given every opportunity to respond and decide if he wishes to block the transfer. We estimate the entire process will take approx. 4-6 weeks.

    For sites that have “hacked versions” of WP Pro Quiz, now might be the time to assess the condition of your WP Pro Quiz install. You may want to check if it is “upgrade ready”, and be aware that an upgraded version of WP Pro Quiz would of course wipe out any hacks of the plugin. If you’re not sure if you’re WP Pro Quiz install has been hacked, run a diff check against WP Pro Quiz 0.37 to find out. We’ll be adding hooks to make WP Pro Quiz extendable, in much the same way we made QuizMaster extendable from the same codebase. If there is a specific area where you need a hook, in order to support a feature you’ve added to a hacked version of WP Pro Quiz, we’ll add that for you so you can move your feature to a custom plugin or theme layer.

    Finally I’d greatly appreciate anyone who supports this initiative to leave a comment, to help show that there is continued interest in having this plugin maintained and supported. Thanks!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • Hi @goldhat, thanks for your work and your time, it’s greatly appreciated!
    I think I’ll have the need to have a modified version of the plugin (aka paid work for a developer -which I’m not- ), but for now it’s only an idea, and I’ll think about it in the next weeks.

    Thanks again ??

    I have been using WP Pro Quiz for 4 years now and find it to be a very well written plugin and have been worried that it hadn’t been updated in quite some time. I also tried reaching out to the developer to ask a few questions about updates, etc. but never received a response. I run an online business that depends on this plugin to work and every time there is an update to any of my plugins or theme, I always tread cautiously and test, test, test, in a backup of my website. So far so good but I know that this will eventually catch up to me. A few weeks ago I started searching for another quiz plugin and came across the blogs about the new Quizmaster coming soon. I am very excited for this and have no problem paying for it. Being able to migrate from old to new is critical for me also. I did try to load the plugin in a development system of mine but the plugin couldn’t be activated for some reason. I am patiently waiting and watching for when Quizmaster will be ready for prime time. I’ll be one of the first to test it… Thanks guys for picking this up and running with it. Best of luck!!

    Toni

    (@tools4toni)

    Hi, I search periodically for WP plug-ins to create online activities for adult English learners, I am a volunteer ESL teacher. I would like very much to use this plug-in! It looked so promising, all the features and 20,000 installs! I am relieved to find, and very much appreciate, any efforts to revive this project.

    Please consider making an affordable, limited, etc., tier for those of us who are not businesses or for profit? I am a happy volunteer English teacher, no support in any way from anything – my sites, hosting, class materials, etc are my own expenses from a fixed income. My idea of fun!

    I support developers and encourage other WP users to support them in almost all reviews I write. I gladly make one-time payments, pay for upgrades I don’t need, and donate to the same plug-ins periodically that I continue to use. I like to pay but I can’t do much. I am grateful for all the work you all do!

    This is an exciting prospect, good luck! I will be watching for developments.
    Thank you.
    Toni

    PS Your post here was not easy to come across among the support threads. I hope that you consider the number of users and not too much weight on our responses here? ??

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by Toni.
    Thread Starter goldhat

    (@goldhat)

    Thanks for the feedback Toni. WP Pro Quiz will always be free… if we can get it to a better state of extendability we’ll release some extensions that will be premium. Would you be able to help us a bit with testing? As we’re making changes to the codebase there is a lot of risk of features breaking… we setup test sites and could use some volunteers to check what works and what doesn’t, and report any issues to the GitHub repo.

    Hello @goldhat
    When you are expecting the transfer of Ownership of WP Pro Quiz to you ??? I am using the site for my website, and I would like to work as volunteer to you, when you provide the update to report any issues.

    Just found this thread. Been using wp pro quiz on a very busy site at a major university for 3 years. I need another solution as the statistics are not reporting correctly. Everything else seems to be working fine. What is the status of wp-pro-quiz2? Can I download it and upgrade my current plugin? Or, am I better off using Quizmaster? I installed it but it became very cumbersome because of the way you have to set up questions separate from the quizzes. We already have quite a few quizzes created and I was hoping that the import would work, but it did not import the questions for some reason.

    Thread Starter goldhat

    (@goldhat)

    We’re aiming for March 1 as the release date for WP Pro Quiz. It may take another 4-6 weeks to have the project re-assigned on www.ads-software.com for it to be available as an automatic update.

    QuizMaster is still in beta and currently we’re replacing ACF as the fields engine. We’ll make the questions easier to associate with quizzes, but questions will remain separate to allow for reuse and dynamic quizzes. The next release is scheduled for the end of January.

    Thread Starter goldhat

    (@goldhat)

    @nightowlaz usually the stats fail due to a php error when sending email, deactivating emails has been reported as a fix by other users.

    Wondering about the status of this…is wp-pro-quiz going to be re-released? Or, should I look into Quiz Master?

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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