16 April 2011

Beta 2 of PL/SQL Challenge V2 now available for review and testing

We have published a new beta version of PL/SQL Challenge 2.0.

You will notice a radically redesigned home page and welcome page (the page you see when you are not already logged in). We like it a lot, and I hope you will, too.

The home page offers an expanded scorecard, as well as quick links to recently taken quizzes and your own submitted quizzes. The Play a Quiz table is now (we believe; you tell us!) much easier to see and work with, especially given the upcoming "explosion" of multiple quizzes that you can take.

Guests (not yet registered) can now play a sample quiz and view up to five past quizzes.

The process of taking a quiz should be bug free. Please check that out.

There are, of course, a number of known issues. I suppose I could list them here, but instead you can view the current list of known issues by clicking on the Feedback button and then choosing the Known Issues report on the bottom of the page.

At this point, we are focused on cleaning up the site, getting everything working, and pushing it out for production use in early May. We welcome - and thank you in advance for - your feedback on this beta.

The beta site may found at:

http://beta.plsqlchallenge.com

You can use your regular email address and password to log in. You will see all the past quiz data available on the production site, as of 13 April.

Cheers, Steven

4 comments:

  1. Hello Steven,

    I just tried the Championship Playoff:

    "Go to: 1 | 2 | 3 | .." speaks for itself, but the buttons "Save this answer", "Save all answers" are not clear? Do I have to save an answer before I go to the next question? Yes the explanation is behind the "help" link, but the time to solve the questions is limited and perhaps it would be better to show this before the quiz starts.

    The Quiz introduction says "you will have 20 minutes to answer 10 quiz questions." and "Quizzes in Competition: 5"

    The Link under the Competitions to PG_ALL_COMP_EVENTS shows "›› View All"

    Over all I like the new look.

    Regards
    Marcus

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Markus. That is a great idea regarding the explanation of how that page works. We will add that to the instructions. And we will certainly change the text on # of quizzes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello Steven,

    I don't know whether this happened to me only,
    but AFTER logging in to the beta site, the
    web pages looks vmpleted messed up, it displays a very, very large dashboard picture,
    probably intended to serve as background,
    while the list of the quizes to be played DOES NOT appear as it did several days ago.

    You have to scroll far, far away to the right and down and then only you can hardly find the links to the quizes, interspersed between the images of the dashboard picture (the cursor even does not change to a "hand" picture, as usual for a link).
    If it were not for the "Answered" specification, that is displayed in Red, I would have never thought that there are any links there.

    Is this really going to be the final look of the page or something is just temporarily messed up ?

    About a week ago everything looked so fine, the quizes were on the main page, visible immediately after the login, and this was great.

    I strongly hope that these problems are temporary, but I'd be glad to have your confirmation for it.

    Thanks a lot & Best Regards,
    Iudith

    ReplyDelete
  4. Iudith,

    Please make sure you do a complete refresh of the page and see if it is still problematic.

    If it is still a problem, please send me screen shots and information about your browser.

    Thanks, SF

    ReplyDelete