Building employee training quizzes with eZ Publish

Rasmussen Reports runs a contest where visitors have to guess what an upcoming public opinion poll result will be.  Participants get points depending on how close they are to the actual result.  A new question is asked every week, making for a fun, recurring way for visitors to interact with site content. Here's how we developed the contest on top of an eZ Publish extension called eZ Survey.

eZ Survey is an eZ Publish extension that enables you to quickly and easily build surveys on a site. Its power is in its "ezsurvey" datatype, which enables editors to add different questions (of different question types) per object, without having to create separate content classes for each different survey. The Mugo Survey Addons extension adds a Matrix question type to the default question types available with eZ Survey.

A common feature need on eZ Publish installations is to have more specific validation on Text Line attributes: if you want to force a field to be in a valid postal code format for example, you have to write a specific datatype for it, or you have to override a template to perform client-side validation only. The Mugo Validated String extension provides a framework around a "Text line (validated)" datatype, where the validation method can be selected via a dropdown list, and developers can quickly create new validation types with a few lines of code. In this post, we explain the extension, as well as how we ported the feature to be used with eZ Survey via the Mugo Survey Addons extension.

In addition to the Matrix question type, we have added these question types: Country (dropdown list of countries), State (similar to country but with USA states and Canadian provinces) and Page break (enabling paginated surveys) to the eZ Survey extension.