aeroquiz.net - aviation learning for pilots

By petsno on 18 Sep 2010 at 18:30 UTC

IN SHORT
Niche site asking quiz questions
MODULES USED
- Embed_widgets
- Lightbox2
- SimpleNews
- Fckeditor
- Views
- Weblinks
Off course other modules are used as well, but these are either required by the above, either of a more administrative nature.

THE STORY
As a private pilot and aviation enthousiast, I notice often that there are interesting bits of information that are not widely known. Because most of these are disseminated through often boring ‘safety leaflets’ of the aeronautical authorities, I looked for another way to share this knowledge in small pieces. Aeroquiz.net was born.
I started in Drupal because of previous experience and because I knew there are many modules available. Because I wanted quite some features on the site, and because I’m not at all technical, I needed these.
A site like this doesn’t has a lot of chance to be bookmarked as a homepage. In order to score recurring visitors I have three strategies:
1. Bi-weekly newsletter with the questions of the past two weeks
2. RSS-feed
3. Widget to be imbedded on other sites

First the very basic set-up. Questions are entered as book-pages in order to have a quick overview, and to be able to flip through them from one question to the other. The answers are pages that open in a lightbox over the question (lightbox2 module). This enables the visitor to just close the answer, and browse to another question easily.

Although ‘lightbox’ works GREAT (just mind that you must put ‘full HTML’ as input format, it also gives some issues. Since the link to the answer is on aeroquiz.net itself (and looks like ‘/node/xx/lightbox2’), it gives an issue when the question is fed to an RSS feed. For instance the RSS feed on iGoogle will then look for the answer on ‘www.google.com/node/xx/lightbox2’. An error is the logical result.
This is still an open issue. The only workaround I found was to copy the code of the question to a new page, make the necessary changes in the URL, and make this new page the only which is ‘promoted to front page’. This is 5 minutes of redundant work and creates unnecessary nodes, so if anybody knows a better way, please help me.

The widget also gave some troubles before I got it to work. I only found two modules that would do the trick: ‘Embed Widget’ and WebWidgets. I chose to work with the first since it presents best and keeps the formatting of aeroquiz.net. An iGoogle gadget is in the works, but I first need to read through the Google documentation.
Something else on this widget: I needed to edit the widget-iframe.tpl.php in order not to print the node title in the widget.

Other lessons learned:

- ‘Panels’ is a great module! It was for me the most straightforward way to create a homepage that automatically refreshes when a new question is posted. This new question is a view of 1 most recent item of type ‘book page’ (as stated earlier, all my questions are of this type).
- I ‘downgraded’ again to fckeditor from ckeditor because I found it to be MUCH better. I also found that both store the pictures in different directories on the site, which is a huge inconvenience to migrate.

Some Drupal requests

- Please put more documentation on cron jobs on the Drupal site, and please build a knowledge base on which hosting company accepts best which cron job. I spend hours in trying the different possibilities
- Same remark goes in general to some other issues: Drupal is very accessible, but not yet open to everybody… off course this is the work of the community volunteers, so I know that instead of criticizing I could help too. (BTW, it’s not my intention to trow stones, on the contrary, I hope that this is takes as positive feedback)
- The widget I use is only a ‘release candidate’, but it was the best I could find. Please develop this further – I think that this will be more and more an interesting extension of a website
- The issue mentioned earlier: Lightbox works great on the same site, but it should be made compatible when the link is fed to an external site in an RSS link, widget or other way…

To-do

- Theming: I need to work on a fresh theme, but am not that creative, so this will take a while.
- Looking for a randomizer to present the reader with a random question. This is a long-term improvement