Installing QuizMaster

Installing QuizMaster is normally a simple matter of copying or moving the 
QuizMaster executable to your Web server's cgi-bin directory and possibly 
setting the standard options near the beginning. A more thorough, step-by-step 
install is detailed below.

QuizMaster requires that Perl be installed on your system. It was developed 
using Apache as the operative Web server, but will probably work just fine with 
any other NCSA-style server that passes standard environment variables to CGI 
scripts. While it may work on NT using Perl/Win32, it has not been tested in 
such situations, and will likely have trouble with directory path separators,
at the very least.

Steps for a full install:

1) Determine the locations of your Perl executable ("which perl"), your Web 
   server's cgi-bin directory, and someplace in your Web site where you'd like 
   QuizMaster to provide a link to at the end of each quiz. 

   (The default setting is for QuizMaster to provide a link back to 
   http://www.yourdomain.tld/, but many sites use this for a one-time intro 
   page, or a sequence of them. You probably want to let users skip the 
   intro if they've already gone through a quiz. Alternatively, you may have
   a personal Web page hosted by your ISP, usually with a URL like: 
   http://www.your-ISP.com/~your-logon-name. In this case, you'll want to 
   set QuizMaster to return to /~your-logon-name instead of shunting your
   site's visitors to your ISP's corporate site.)

   You may also want to set up a standard directory for quiz files; the default 
   is /quizzes/, but if you have an ISP setup as mentioned before, you'll want 
   QuizMaster to look in /~your-logon-name/quizzes.
2) Edit the QuizMaster executable: set the first line to point to the Perl 
   executable on your system if it isn't /usr/bin/perl; set the locations for 
   $Base_Dir and $ServerMainPage to whatever you determined in step 1.
3) Copy or move the QuizMaster executable to your cgi-bin directory and ensure 
   that it has the proper permissions. A listing should look like:

      [yourname@yourserver cgi-bin]$ ls -l Q*
      -rwxr-xr-x   1 yourname yourgroup    23845 Mar 29 19:19 QuizMaster
      [yourname@yourserver cgi-bin]$

   The date and time should be those for when you extracted QuizMaster's tar 
   file, and the byte size may be different; I don't intend to maintain that 
   detail of the docs as I make changes to QuizMaster. The "-rwxr-xr-x" at the 
   beginning should be exactly alike, however, and "yourname" should match your 
   login name.

   Now test the QuizMaster executable. Try to run it from the command line, and 
   it should spew a few lines of HTML at you, as follows:

      [yourname@yourserver cgi-bin]$ ./QuizMaster
      Content-type: text/html

      <HTML>

      <HEAD>
      <TITLE>Quiz-Master Error!</title>
      </head>

      <BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#CC0000">

      <H1>Quiz-Master Error!</h1>

      <P>No quiz name was supplied.
      </p>
      <P>Please contact the <A HREF="mailto:webmaster@">server administrator</a>.
      </p>
      </body>
      </html>

      [yourname@yourserver cgi-bin]$

   If you want to test this over the Web, you should be able to go to 
   http://www.yourhostname.tld/cgi-bin/QuizMaster and get the same page (which 
   will, of course, look much prettier in your Web browser).

4) Test to make sure it can really handle a quiz: copy or move the demo-quiz
   and bg-red-gradient.gif files to your /quizzes directory, and the 
   quiz-file-format.html file to your DocumentRoot directory. (This is the 
   directory where your index.html file resides; on a standard ISP account, it 
   will generally be called public_html, while on a full Web server it may go 
   by any of a number of names, including: /home/httpd/html, 
   /usr/local/apache/htdocs, /home/www/html, /usr/local/www/htdocs, or many 
   others. If you need help, ask your system administrator.)
   
   Finally, copy the quiz-index.html file to your /quizzes directory, and 
   rename it to index.html.

   Now, fire up your Web browser and point it at your /quizzes directory. 
   Basically, type in whatever URL you normally hand out to people when you
   want to tell them "look at my site", with "/quizzes" on the end. (If your
   URL normally ends in a slash, then just tack on "quizzes" so there's only
   one slash.) You should see a page that says "Welcome to QuizMaster" and
   gives you a chance to run the Demo Quiz. Try it. If the demo quiz works,
   then QuizMaster works and is properly installed on your system.

   That same "Welcome to QuizMaster" Web page has a variety of helpful
   comments buried in it that explain how to make QuizMaster start a
   given quiz. Just as the demo quiz makes a good example of how to
   write a quiz file, that index.html page should enable you to create
   the forms that will start quizzes running.

