Online Test / written in PHP

[kellyalan]

Hi

 

We had an online aptitude test written for us back in 2004/2005. A user registers on our site then can take a test that evaluates what type of learner they are. After they complete the test, we can send them a .pdf report.

 

The front end of our site is a wordpress site, the testing center is written in php. Once a user registers, they get a link on our site that sends them out of wordpress to the PHP testing pages.

 

Question: if we have 4-5 users sign up at once ( which isn't a problem in wordpress ), is there a way to allow for those users to take the aptitude test all at once.

 

As of now, the "testing center" part of our site is only allowing 1 user at a time. 

 

Is this how PHP works? Is it the hosting server? We are hosted by Network Solutions. 

 

The test is around 120 questions long and 3 pages. 

 

Thanks in advance.

[mac_gyver]

there's no (good) reason that an application wouldn't allow any number of users to concurrently visit any page on a site and produce a result specific to the visitor. the code must therefore be doing something wrong, which we cannot tell you without knowing what exactly the code is.

 

code would typically either use session variables or store data in a database using the user's id and any number of different visitors could be accommodated.

[kellyalan]

Thanks for the reply. Do you have a suggestion for posting the code and/or hiring someone to take a quick look to see what might be the issue?  (fingers crossed that it's a quick fix)

 

There are a lot of php pages that come together to make the questionnaire/test.

[Jacques1]

What exactly is the problem, anyway? How do you know that only one user is allowed? Are you getting an error message? Are new users somehow blocked? Do old users get thrown out?

[kellyalan]

Normally we do this test with one athlete at a time. However, recently we had 8 members of a team try to do it at once. 

[Jacques1]

And then ...? Again: I'm asking for the specific problem. What happens?

 

You've claimed that only one person can use the test at a time. That's too vague. It may not even be true (maybe there's some other problem, maybe the user interface is confusing, I don't know).

 

If you want any kind of feedback from this forum, you need to be specific. We know nothing about your application or your problem. If the application simply crashes, that's a bad sign and may require extensive debugging as well as code changes. If there's an intentional limit, that's a good sign and may indeed be a quick fix (this is an estimate, not a definite fact).

[kellyalan]

Sorry - here we go - some of this has come to light as the day progressed(I wasn't at the testing)....

 

First issue was that we had 2 ipads so 2 people were taking the test at a time. Wordpress, after multiple logins and logouts from the same IP addresses, gave us a "spambot" alert - from the Jetpak plugin - so in the future, we'll use it as private browsing and in the meantime, have deactivated the Jetpak setting. We seem ok on that issue now. Multiple users can log into our site and they can go to the testing center.

 

Second, in the backend - all PHP coded / not wordpress - we had our first 2 athletes simultaneously take the test - it worked, we got a PDF output with the athlete's test results. The next two athletes tried - one test worked, one test didn't. We can't figure out why one took and one didn't. Maybe user, error maybe not but everything we've gone over today indicated that this person took the test correctly and submitted correctly. 

 

The application doesn't crash, it simply seems to have only worked(registered all of the answers to the test and then output a pdf and an HTML version) 3/4 of the time. 

 

Ultimately, I'd like to locate someone who, since the code is from 2004, can look it over and give us an indication if we're out of date and if there might be anything we can do to modernize the process. Maybe PHP hasn't changed significantly in the 12 years since our test's inception but better to be safe than sorry.  

 

The site is http://manofsteelesports.com/home/

 

I've attached an small image of the output that the test provides us(as admins). We can show it in HTML format for the user, we can display it as a PDF, we can download it, or we can email to the user.

[kicken]

Maybe PHP hasn't changed significantly in the 12 years since our test's inception but better to be safe than sorry.

PHP (and the web in general) has changed quite a bit since then. Well written code from that era may still work fine on a modern PHP version, but poorly written code may have problems. If it's truly code from that era, you maybe looking at a complete re-write to bring it up to modern standards. How much of the original code could be re-used would depend on how well it was written at the time.

 

If you post the code here someone may be able to review it and at the least give you an idea of what it might take to fix it. If you'd prefer to keep the code private you'd likely have to hire someone to look at it.