Whodunit - Questions on building a website for detective stories

Dear community,

I need some advice on how grav might help me to develop a project for work. It would be great if someone could help me out.

I am working at a university on a project which aims to improve the reading skills of children. The project consists of several web sites, one of them features whodunnits/detective stories and the young readers have to answer questions testing their reading comprehension skills. The current web site is based on a sql-database and php/html/css. It works fine, but it is very complicated for our students to add their own stories, as they have to access the data base. Furthermore, due to various reasons, the site has to be stripped down, e.g. the current account system is going to be removed. So theoretically, the data base is not really needed anymore and a grav-based solution might replace the current web site.

My questions now are the following:

1. Is it possible to create a custom theme for grav which mimics the look of the current web site with my limited web design skills?

2. How do I insert very basic quiz-like elements, like singe/multiple choice questions, in a simple way, so that students may add their own stories (and questions)?

It would be great if you could give me some starting points. Thanks in advance for your answers!

Hello @Olivander12, I am a university instructor with Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada and have several Grav themes/skeletons designed for open education resources (Open Course Hub, Open Publishing Space and Learn2 with Git Sync).

Re: question 1 this is hard to say without seeing some examples of the website in question but as a tech-savvy instructor I've found Grav to be much easier to more extensively customize that other platforms I've used such as WordPress, Moodle, etc. Have you looked at https://getgrav.org/downloads/skeletons to see if any skeletons/themes are close to what you are looking for?

Re: question 2 have you seen H5P (https://h5p.org/)? You can build a lot of different types of interactive objects, including quizzes, and then embed them into Grav sites (or any site for that matter).

If you'd like to chat more about Grav in the education space feel free to connect with me directly in the Grav Discord Chat Room https://getgrav.org/discord

Thank you very much for your answer. H5P looks very interesting, thanks for that.

The web site looks like this:

Basically, I have to adapt the color scheme of the old page. How would you suggest should I create a custom theme?

It really depends on the suitability of Grav for the content and your skill level... I'd still suggest looking over the skeletons and seeing if there is anything you see as a workable starting point etc. I myself had only basic HTML/CSS skills, and found learning Twig much better than trying to hack PHP 🙂 Perhaps take a look at the Twig docs to see how it looks to you https://twig.symfony.com/doc/1.x/