Settings / options

The are several options for the Qwiz plugin that you can specify with the Qwiz Settings menu page.

You access the Qwiz Settings menu page by navigating Dashboard > Settings > Qwizcards

Here are brief notes on the available options.

Mobile-device full-screen option/icon

On small-screen devices, the default is that users automatically see a full-screen view of a quiz or flashcard deck once the user starts that quiz or deck. Also, an icon allows the user to switch the full-screen view off and on. You can disable the full-screen views and icon.

First-card Qwizcards icon/link

By default the first “card” of a flashcard deck or the first page of a quiz show a “Q” icon in the bottom-left corner, which provides a link to the Qwizcards web site.  You can hide the icon, or show the icon without a link.

Free-form input options

You can specify several default settings for questions and flashcards with free-form input (where the user types a few letters and selects from a list of suggestions).

Default for use_dict.  Whether an English-language dictionary will be used for suggestion words.  You can override this default on a quiz- or flashcard-specific basis by adding a “use_dict” attribute to the [qwiz] or [qdeck] shortcode.

Default for use_terms.  Whether a list of biology terms will be used for suggestion words.  You can override this default on a quiz- or flashcard-specific basis by adding a “use_terms=” attribute to the [qwiz] or [qdeck] shortcode.

Seconds till “Hint” shown.   How long before the “Hint” button automatically appears.

Hangman hint options

You can change how many hints (letters) may be given.  You can also customize this for individual questions or flashcards by adding a “hints=” attribute to the hangman shortcode.

Customize button labels, etc.

You can change the text that appears on buttons, or anywhere else.  For example, you could change the flashcard button, “Need more practice,” to “Try card again later”.  The Qwizcards Settings page has instructions.

Disable automatic shortcode error check and dataset question save on Publish/Update

If the error check interferes with your Publish/Update function, you can disable it here.

Check shortcodes for errors on every page/post

You can have Qwizcards perform error checks of quiz and flashcard deck shortcodes on every page load (useful if you’ve disable the previous “shortcode error check on Publish/Update”).

HTML element that contains quiz and flashcard content (shortcodes, etc.)

Normally, WordPress page content is within a div having class “entry-content”.  Some themes change this, however, and then the Qwiz plugin won’t work (it leaves your shortcodes showing, rather than turning them into quizzes and flashcard decks).  You can change where the Qwiz plugin will look for the page content with this option.

 

 

 

28 thoughts on “Settings / options

  1. Shawn

    Another question, induced by my attempt at making vocabulary cards: I have found that above a certain number of cards (200 or so), starting the wizard becomes very very slow, to the point where the browser actually says the page has become unresponsive. (If one chooses to wait, it does seem to eventually work, but.)

    I’d like to have a very large (a thousand or more) set of vocabulary cards. Can any debugging be done to look into improving this?

    I noticed that reordering cards can take a long time too. Perhaps when opening the wizard, some similar processing takes place?

    I’m not the best JS programmer ever, but I can take a look into this. But I wondered if it was a problem you already knew about, were working on, etc. Cheers!

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner Post author

      I’m not seeing such a problem with the wizard, and I’ve got a 440-card deck. The wizard is ready in about three seconds. Perhaps you could share the “source code” (WordPress “Text mode”) for your deck, and I can see how that works on my installation (email to dan_kirshner@yahoo.com). At some point a guest WordPress user account on your system may be necessary to see what’s going on…

      Reply

        1. Dan Kirshner Post author

          Update: various workarounds/speedups are implemented in Qwizcards version 3.82. “Works like LIGHTNING” even on a 1200+ card deck.

          Reply

  2. Shawn

    Is there a way to create just one set of cards but have it pick the side of each card randomly, so I can create a set of vocabulary cards and in each case, you might have to know the English word from the foreign one, OR know the foreign one from the English one?

    Obviously I could just make twice as many cards, but that’s a bit tedious …

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner Post author

      No, there isn’t currently. Hadn’t thought of that! Give us a few days and we’ll implement something like an option for [qdeck random_front_back=”true”]. Thanks –Dan

      Reply

        1. Dan Kirshner Post author

          Update: Qwizcards version 3.82 includes an option like [qdeck show_first=”random”]. It’s settable in the wizard.

          Reply

  3. Yooah

    Hi, any way I could style the buttons below flashcards? Like adding css to the theme or which file and lines should I edit in the plugin folders? I tried changing some stuff in qwizcards.css and qwiz.css but it has no effect.

    Thanks for the great plugin!

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner Post author

      Thanks! What you did should work — it could be a cache issue, but sometimes a WordPress site itself caches files, so clearing your browser cache doesn’t help.

      Even when that works, there’s an easier way to do it, with the benefit that you won’t lose your changes when you update the plugin.

      Do WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS

      Add something like:

      .qwiz_button {background: green;}

      and click “Publish”. That should do it!

      Reply

  4. David

    Hi Dan,
    this is great! As a hint to others, I had a problem with some images overflowing the flashcard box. That went away when I removed all styling. So I had width =100% and then was playing with height to try to make the box big enough for my images. When I removed all sizing information, everything started working both on my PC and on my telephone screen. The only shortcode I have now on my deck is… [qdeck card_back=”white”]

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner

      Sorry, we don’t have such an option. Nothing will be done with unused accounts (no emails or notifications, for example), so it shouldn’t make any difference.

      Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner

      Log in via the black down-triangle on any quiz or flashcard deck. Once you’re logged in, hover on the green down-triangle and click “My account – settings”.

      Reply

  5. Tom

    Hey Dan,

    Using all the strings I translated all I needed on the flashcards. Thanks so far.
    But one thing will not translate:
    Even though “tries” was translated and shows translated in other positions, it is not changed at the end of the stack when one or more topics were not answered the first time.
    Example:
    Topic: 2 Karten (was “cards”), 8 tries;

    I tried to go through the code but my knowledge is just basic.

    Thanks so much for your plugin and help!
    Tom

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner

      Hello Tom: Thanks for bearing with us on this! That’s a bug – that output wasn’t tagged for translation. There are three ways you can fix this:
      1. We’ve updated the current version — 3.32. You’d have to delete and reinstall the Qwizcards plugin to get the update.

      2. On the Qwizcards settings page, at the bottom you could “Revert to an earlier version” — entering version 0.00 will actually get you “beta 1 for 3.33” which includes the update.

      3. You could update the code on your site. On Dashboard > Plugins > Plugin Editor, choose Qwizcards from “Select plugin to edit” at the top right. Then click “qwizcards.js” in the list on the right (I found it as fifth from the bottom). Finally, on line 3741, change

         'tries';

      at the end of the line to

         T ('tries');

      and finally click “Update File” at the bottom.

      Whichever strikes you as easiest!

      Reply

  6. Tom

    Hey,
    That’s what I kind of started but got frustrated with.
    But, now it seems to work for some reason. Great!

    Now I can pull all strings out of the PHP and translate as much I as I need to!

    Cheers
    Tom

    Reply

  7. Tom

    Hi, I just found this wordpress plugin. I could adjust everything I wanted to change so far, except that last page on the card after all cards are checked.

    Where can I adjust these two outputs?

    “This flashcard stack had 26 cards. It took you 29 tries until you felt comfortable enough to click “Kann ich!” for each card.

    This is the only topic for which you clicked “Später erneut üben”:
    abc: 24 cards, 27 tries.”

    I tried to change the strings_to_translate.php, but it does not seem to work.

    Many Thanks!

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner

      It looks like you were able to use the “Customize button labels, etc.” section of Dashboard > Settings > Qwizcards to change “Got it!” to “Kann ich!”. Good! The only trick to the rest is that it comes in pieces. “strings_to_translate.php” tells you what the pieces look like. The relevant strings are:

      This flashcard stack has %s cards.
      It took you
      try
      tries
      until you felt comfortable enough to click
      for this card
      for each card
      This is the only topic for which you clicked

      Also, you’ll need to provide translations of “one, “two”, … “ten”!

      (There’s an elaborate WordPress procedure to process “strings_to_translate” before it takes effect — let’s stick with this if it works!)

      Reply

  8. Mike

    Hello Dan Kirshner,

    Your product is so awesome.

    However, I have several questions I want to ask.

    1. Does your product work independently from your website? If your website has some problem like out of service, Can it still work?

    2. Can you combine together flashcard and quiz to make it more useful? For example, after several flashcard, it will turn to quiz mode so that it can check users if they remember the flashcard. We have a technique called Spaced repetition. I really want to make a flashcard deck to learn English.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

    3. Can I create a deck in a page and call it in other page? For example, I want to create a page named flash card library. Whenever i need to use a deck for my user i just need to have some shortcode like [deck id=zzzzzz] and it will appear in my page.

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner

      Thanks!

      1. Work independently from my website? Yes. Qwizcards depends only on your WordPress server — everything comes from there. In fact, once you’ve opened a page, no further communication with your WordPress host is needed. This assumes you’re not using the student progress recording/reporting functions — qwiz and flashcard results are indeed recorded on our website’s server.

      2. Flashcards/quizzes combined? It’s a good suggestion! We’ve thought about it a bit, and at this point it’s a little too difficult — we went down a different road (separate modules) a long time ago. You can always follow up flashcards with a quiz on the same page, and even include “Exit text” in the flashcards telling users to next take the quiz.

      3. Call a deck from another page? No, not yet. We are working on a “central database” of quizzes, questions, etc., which will provide the same functionality, as well as capabilities for mixing/matching questions, even on the fly (“use questions with topic _____”).

      Reply

  9. Denis Slota

    Is there anyway to have the core of your program have the option of reading the [q] and [a]’s from

    a text file instead of from the page. The text file would be read into from the media library.

    This way, the header can be defined on the page and all I have to do is update the text file that

    contains the [q] and [a]’s. This would be an additional option, therefore the plug-in would work

    as normal with out this option.

    Example:
    [qdeck]
    [i] This set of flashcards will test your knowledge of typical English words to their phonetic

    Korean equivalent.
    Here’s how it works:
    1. Click ‘Flip’ to see the answer to each card.
    2. If you know it, click ‘Got it.’
    3. If you don’t know it as well as you’d like to, click ‘Need more practice,’ and that card will

    go to the bottom of the stack so you can practice it again.
    4. ‘Shuffle’ lets you shuffle the deck.
    [start]
    [q&a = http://www.tkdessentials.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Qwiz_E2K.txt%5D
    [/qdeck]

    What do you think?

    Reply

    1. Dan Kirshner

      I’ll add this to my “to-do” list, but I’ve got a number of things on the list already.

      The ability to cut-and-paste questions into an ordinary WordPress page/post seems to me to be an adequate substitute for now. In fact, that seems easier to me than creating/updating and uploading a separate .txt file. Am I missing something here?

      Thanks for the suggestion!

      –Dan

      Reply

      1. Denis Slota

        I already have a source file that contains the [q] and [a] in a different format in Microsoft Excel. I wrote a quick VB macro to output in the format that you require. If I have a lot of questions, I thought it would be easier to reference a file in the Media Library then to cut and paste into the page. Also, if I wanted to change the [q] and [a] quickly, i could just change the one line on the page that references a different text file with [q] and [a] in the media library. I agree that I don’t need this feature because you can do the cut and paste to the page, but it would be a nice improvement (in my opinion).

        Reply

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