It is a website with programming exercises - you can quickly deploy it on your own server (even free hosting) - and build something like ProjectEuler or Rosalind.Info. Actually, it is more powerful as problems you create will include data generator / checker code, so that users are every time provided with newly generated, random set of data (and of course, another answer is expected every time).

This project started as https://www.codeabbey.com in September of 2013 and is now (as of summer 2024) moving to opensource, so that everyone can quickly setup similar website for personal coding puzzle collection, or for school, enterprise company needs (e.g. for interviewing, screening candidates).

Quick video-demo: deploy CodeAbbey site at free web-hosting

For proof-testing we also started another site based on this sources - dedicated to exercises in Physics:
Alferov's Peace

Here are two parts - one about how it works and another about how to run it. Consult them in any order according to your needs.

To make studying the project easier it could be done in steps. These steps are represented by certain points (branches) in repository, as more and more functionality are added.

• Step 1 - framework - at this point here is bare minimum of files, or "framework" which work for page loading. Refer to README in this version to learn more.
• Step 2 - users - now database is enabled and functionality of registering users, login, logout is added.
• Step 3 - htaccess - about some important features which are configured outside PHP code
• Step 4 - tasks - pages for creating, editing, listing and viewing tasks.
• Step 5 - submit - submission and checking.
• Step 6 - userrank - user profile and ranking pages.
• Step 7 - sync - no critical features added, mainly some improvements due to syncronizing codebase with existing website.
• Step 8 - customization minor tweaks and rearrangements to help you customize the site elements (project name, title, author, fragments etc)
• Step 9 - task tags task tags and "volumes"
• Step 10 - wiki "wiki" pages support
• Step 11 - solvers about viewing solutions
• Step 12 - customization-2 more configuration, and mess-hall working
• Step 13 - forum well, forum files and tables are added here

With this update we include files which provide forums functionality. Note that database uses 3 tables for forums - add them to your existing installation if you upgrade from previous steps. These tables are called forums, topics and posts. Each topic consists of the sequence of posts - and on the other side every post belongs to one of several forums (in this context every "forum" is rather a "section" of the global forum).

At least it was initial model used in CodeAbbey.

With the time it become obvious there is not so many activity and multiple forum sections are not really necessary and may be sometimes even confusing (at this specific website). So they were slighty modified to work in a "single-forum mode". Actually these all (five) forums remained there but their list of topics is combined and new posts always go into "general" forum.

In this opensource solution we add configuration option singleForum (defaults to false) which controls how forums operate.

Exercises

• add tables and files, login as admin and create some post;
• add new section (i.e. another record to forums table) - regretfully for this there is no web-interface yet, you'll need to do this directly in database;
• add record to this new subforum; try adding records as simple user (you'll need to deal with problem solving limit set for every forum);
• switch the singleForum option to true, investigate how forum look changes, find the old forum_main page and make sure all dedicated subforums still exist
• figure out how topics could be moved between forums (admin's feature).

As an extra exercise think of what functionality may be necessary for managing forums - e.g. page for adding new sections, removing sections (probably they should be empty?) editing data there. Feel free to propose pages for them or try making them yourself and create pull-requests.

This is a typical PHP + MySQL application, so you need an http-server with PHP interpreter and MySQL (MariaDB).

There are THREE ways to launch this zoo relatively easily.

Docker is something resembling virtual-machine (but not exactly) widely used in industry. We describe the content of "containers" we need in a file (or few) and docker prepares everything. You'll need to install docker itself (there could be subtle steps like setting user group in linux but generally it is not much complicated) - this is available in linux, windows and OsX. Then run files docker-build.sh to build an image containing our Apache2 httpd + PHP server with MariaDB in one. then docker-run.sh to launch container from it. If all is fine, the site should be ready at http://localhost:8080/

To initialize database: open http://localhost:8080/sqlexec.php and copy-paste content of the file dbinit.sql into the textarea, then click exec.

Pick some free hosting, for example AwardSpace / AtWebpages and simply copy files there. If you'll get error because RewriteRules exist in .htaccess while the server has no rewrite module enabled, and you can't control it - just comment these lines.

Then you'll get the site running on the web. There could be some limitations about some auxiliary functions (e.g. 3rd party login etc) but that's not much important for you now (such things anyway require efforts to setup).

Setup database: this is done with control-panel of the hosting - generally you are provided with some database name and connection info and create user here via web-interface. So then you need to put corresponding settings into conf.php file and populate database with tables, for which use the content of dbinit.sql except first few lines (no user or db creation) with some query running tool in the web-interface.

With this approach you'll find software package (by the name XAMPP probably) which contains HTTP server, PHP and MySQL inside and set up on your machine. It is not very difficult also and in some respects more handy than with docker. Then copy files there and setup database. For managing database there should be PHPMyAdmin web tool in the LAMPP packet - make use of it and generally follow instructions for shared hosting given above.

It is natural that after your deploy succeeds and you see the website running with joy, you may want to change its name, title and some general fragments. This is what we call "customization". What makes customization a bit tedious, is that you want to keep compatibility with the original sources, so that when "upstream" repository updates, you can update your site in as simple way as possible.

This means that simply starting tweaking all files carelessly may be not exactly what you want - with the first update you'll inadvertently override half of your changes!

We are trying to simplify this for you and by now this is achieved with the following:

• you need not modify file conf.php in the root, instead just drop along it the similar file named cust_conf.php and put your real secrets and settings here (feel free to remove all lines that do not differ, these files are loaded one after another); of course you should never commit your file with real secrets to any public repository etc!
• find settings with project name, webpage general title, site author etc in the conf.php - and update them to your taste and needs (of course, again do it in cust_conf.php).
• if you want to replace some fragments files, just copy them with some new name (e.g. copy main_bottomnote.html to main_bottomextra.html, then go to configuration file and find array custFrag, put replacement here, e.g. 'main_bottomnote' => 'main_bottomextra', then make any changes in this new fragment file instead; also you can use empty name if you want some fragment to be removed (by default it happens to adblock fragment).