I need recommendations for plugins for two things

[ Moderator note: moved to Fixing WordPress. ]

I am getting back into things WordPress after a health related hiatus.

I need thus recommendations for plugins for two things, before I dive in and create my own. After all, why reinvent the wheel. NB: while the two plugins are not necessarily related, I can see contexts in which they would be priceless when used together, so they ‘ought to play nice.’

I am looking at creating a multisite deployment with two sections for the main site, but I want both plugins to be available on all sites in the multisite deployment to be used as required. The main site would be my own, but I’d like to make the remainder ‘available’ to other authors interested in creating educational content.

The first plugin is intended to support rather classical instructional systems design and evaluation including pretesting, content delivery and post testing. This, from the perspective of instructional systems design, requires support for creation of a test question bank from which both the pretest and post test questions are drawn, and obviously there’d need to be a mechanism to ensure the same question is not chosen for a given learner for both the pretest and post test. To begin, I’d support only multiple choice and true/false questions, but later, I’d look at supporting other kinds of questions IFF I can figure out how to use machine enhanced evaluation for more general essay and problem solving questions. If, for example, the instruction is for quantitative computer programming, I have yet to figure out how to automate evaluation of a question like “Write five different functions that generate random numbers, plus supporting functions that can a) prove your rng functions work as designed, b) verify the advantages of each in a spectrum of problem domains that require random numbers, and c) support investigation of the efficiency and correctness of each relative to the others in several contexts.” At present, I have no idea how to automate evaluation of such a question. For the content delivery, I need to support not only text and graphics (including but not limited to, possibly, cartoons, animation, photos and movies), but also an ability to automatically select content based on answers given for pretest questions. E.g., identify content to be delivered for each possible answer to each question selected.

My second plugin is intended to support cartoon/comic strip contests. What this requires is a kind of registration/login support, including name, address, phone of the contestants (so winners can be reached for obvious purposes), but, as a major factor in my intent being to support instruction, I’d need registrants to give the name and address of their school as well as the name and contact number of relevant school staff (principal, teacher, administrator, etc. as relevant). I also want to support a nom de plume, in cases in which the cartoon topic may be perceived as sensitive. I want the contestant, once logged in, to be able to select a contest and upload his comic(s) or comic strip in the form of a suitable graphics file (jpeg, gif, png, or, for the more adventurous, mng). I do not know if such graphics files can contain malware, but if so I’d want to be able to pre-scan them before they can be deployed on my site. I want the people viewing the cartoons to be able to vote on the entries subject to such voters being required to log in as a voter (implying very restricted rights), write a paragraph or two of a critique, to be published with his/her vote. As I want my site to be kid friendly I need the ability to prevent use of obscenities as well as to delete content/votes (i.e. if I delete content because of obscenity, the vote that accompanied the obscenity would obviously be invalid also) that succeed in being obscene without using obscenities. Obviously, I will need to be able to prevent comments/votes after the contest is closed. Obviously I will also need to be able to provide, as warranted by the design of the contest, a few paragraphs of prose if the intent of the contest is to provide a short story (e.g. about a historical event) that the cartoons are to ‘illustrate’. I will also need to provide support for judges to assign scores relating to different aspects of the cartoons, as well as an overall score. For example, if the story is about the French revolution, for example, one criterion might involve the clothing worn and how accurate a portrayal the cartoon provides for the clothing worn by the cartoon characters, while another criterion might relate to how accurately the buildings shown in the cartoons are. Finally, I want to be able to support allowing the contestants to provide a SHORT essay, and a list of annotated references, so that contest judges and viewers alike can see why the cartoons are drawn as they are and what source materials were used to guide the depiction of clothes and buildings, etc.

It seems to me that it is almost certain I will need to write some code, but what plugins can you recommend to use to support some or all of what I need, so that most of the code I write involves just getting a ‘ideally small’ set of plugins to work together to support all that I require.

The observant reader will note that I assume that my contestants have the means to create cartoons, so if you know of a small plugin that supports creation of png or mng cartoons, and that is of good quality and is safe and can be used to help kids create content, I’d love to hear about it.

NB: I am a bit nervous as I am an ancient programmer used to languages like FORTRAN, C++ and Perl, and in fact all my web development was done using Perl for the front end, so I have a ‘adventure’ myself in terms of mastering PHP and developing/using PHP plugins….

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for plugin recommendations and any advice you may offer.

Ted