Katherine Jenkins will be meeting and greeting her fans before shows on her upcoming tour. While fans could buy a limited number of VIP tickets to the shows a few meet & greet spaces were made available for fans to win. Our Head of Digital, Sam Stubbings, came up with the idea of limited quizzes to test the fans’ knowledge about Katherine.

I had to build the system in-house so set about creating a PHP & MySQL powered quiz system.

I spent ages modifying ElenMan’s PHP quiz system, converting from SimpleXML to a MySQL database, adding a timer to the score, forcing the user registration and styling it to suit Katherine’s website. While the system worked well most of the time it would occasionally drop sessions and fall apart unpredictably.

On the tube ride home the night before the competition launched I decided to start from scratch and sketched out a new flow diagram on a newspaper.

I went back to basics and wrote a php system that uses classic html forms to process the data and post the scores to a MySQL database.

The competition was limited to Katherine’s Diamond Club members’ area so I had Iwan Moore at Isle Interactive build a dynamic page that registers the user’s Diamond Club membership name and sends it to the quiz. My quiz system then processes that along with the users’ results. To prevent anyone from improving their score I ensured that fans could only take each quiz once.

Each quiz is made up of six questions, with five answers each. I used some Javascript to disable the submit button until one of the multiple choice questions had been selected.

Next, I added a timer system to record how long a fan takes to complete a quiz, this would be used to even out any tie-breaker situations.

I configured the results page to show users how they scored on each question. Correct answers are highlighted in blue while incorrect answers are highlighted in red.

Finally the users are presented with a leaderboard to show them where they placed in that particular competition.

The competition ran across 15 concert dates, so I had to duplicate the quiz for each show and set-up the different questions compiled by Jonathan Pumphrey, Alex Burford & Katherine’s management.