Joomla! Discussion Forums

The extension is called Mad Blanks, a name intended to be reminiscent of Mad Libs. Or you could think of it as a form letter component for your Joomla! website. In either case, you are providing content with blanks in it. You or your users then fill in the blanks. Or you are simply asking questions that your visitors respond to. Then you can show a list of the results (for example, show all the Mad Libs your visitors have filled in) on your website for your visitors to see, or don't show them publicly and just keep them in your website's database for your own reference.

Another way to think of it is as a general purpose database for your website. (Think Filemaker Pro or MS Access.) That leads to a host of applications, especially since you can use HTML and CSS in your "form letter".

Not only that, but Score Scripts allow you to interact with your visitor by responding to what s/he put in the blanks. This feature is primarily used to give quizzes and to score them. A quiz is an example of a fill-in-the-blanks scenario in which there are right and wrong answers. You can use a Score Script to tell the user s/he got X number or percentage of questions right, or s/he earned Y number of points.

If you learn better by example than explanation and you are interested from what you've read so far, please go to the http://www.madblanks.org website for examples.

Each of the following example applications would be handled by setting up a Mad Blanks category. A list of responses from your users could then be displayed.

Application example 1: Fill in the following Mad Lib:
Mary had a little [field 1], whose [field 2] was white as snow.

Application example 2: Fill in the following quotation--[field 1] is the quote and [field 2] is the author:
"[field 1]"
-[field 2]

Application example 3: Reviews of a product:
[field 1] reviewed the product and gave it [field 2] stars out of 5. [field 1 (again)]'s comments about the product are: [field 3]

NOTE: You could also do something like this to display different images depending on user input: The reviewer gave it stars.

Application example 4: Feedback form:
In this case, you are asking questions and not necessarily trying to put together a "form letter" with the results. The responses are simply stored in the database and not displayed on the site.

Application example 5: Quiz
Again, you are asking questions and not necessarily trying to put together a "form letter" to display the results. However, you may want to tell the user how well s/he did with a Score Script.

The extensions directory listing is here:

http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

Thanks!