The best feature requests don't come from a roadmap - they come from people actually using the software. Over the past few months, a few QuizLab Pro users got in touch with some thoughtful suggestions about how the extension could work better for their specific situations. A lot of those ideas made it into the extension. This post covers the key updates.
None of these are edge cases either. Smarter feedback, more control over learner flow, and better scoring options are things that anyone building a serious quiz in Joomla will eventually want. Here's what's new.
Conditional Explanations
The most recent addition, and one that makes an immediate difference to learner experience.
Previously, QuizLab Pro supported a single explanation per question - shown after any answer. Now you can set different explanations depending on whether a learner got it right or wrong. Correct answers get one response; incorrect or partially correct answers get another.
This matters because the feedback a learner needs after a correct answer ("well done, here's why that's right") is different from what they need after a wrong one ("here's where that thinking goes astray"). A shared explanation usually ends up being a compromise that serves neither situation particularly well.
You can also leave explanations off entirely, or keep the single shared explanation if that's what suits your content. Essay questions retain the shared option since correctness is determined later through manual review. Existing explanations carry over automatically on upgrade - nothing to reconfigure.
Smart Redirects After Pass or Fail
A trainer asked for a way to send learners somewhere useful after finishing a quiz, rather than leaving them sitting on the result screen. That's now built in.
You can configure separate destinations for pass and fail outcomes. Each can appear as a button on the result screen - useful when you want learners to still have access to their result, certificate, or retry option - or redirect automatically after a short delay if you'd rather move them on immediately.
There's also a per-question destination option, so you can link learners to a related Joomla article, a handout, or revision material directly from the question itself. These can appear alongside the Next Question button or redirect automatically.
A few things worth knowing: redirects are off by default, so nothing changes for existing quizzes unless you enable them. Pass/fail redirects are suppressed while essay answers are waiting for manual review, which prevents learners being sent on before their result is final. And if a learner follows a question destination before finishing, the attempt stays available to resume.
Content Slides
Content slides let you drop a page of information into the quiz flow - rich text, images, media handled by Joomla content plugins - without it affecting scoring.
Learners see a Continue button rather than an answer prompt. The slide is recorded as viewed for resume and completion tracking, but carries no points and is excluded from scoring totals and reports. If you're using random question selection, content slides stay in their authored position while the assessable questions are randomised around them.
This is useful anywhere you want to set context before a question, break a longer quiz into sections, or deliver a short piece of instruction mid-flow. Quizzes containing content slides show their total as steps rather than questions, which is a cleaner way to represent a mixed-content flow to learners.
Feedback Timing
A smaller but genuinely useful addition: you can now control when question feedback appears.
The default behaviour - showing correct/incorrect feedback after each answer - suits most quiz formats. But for assessments where you don't want learners adjusting their thinking based on early feedback, the new At the End Only mode submits each answer and moves straight to the next question without revealing whether it was right. Learners see the full results at the end, as configured.
Partial Credit for Multiple-Select Questions
Multiple-select scoring has become more flexible. There are now three modes:
Exact Match keeps the existing behaviour - full marks for getting every selection right, nothing for anything else.
Partial Credit awards points for correct selections and subtracts for incorrect ones, never dropping below zero. This suits situations where you want to reward partial knowledge rather than treating near-misses the same as complete misses.
Partial Credit with Selection Limit goes a step further - learners are limited to the number of correct answers, so they can't hedge by selecting everything. Points are awarded for correct selections only, with no penalty for wrong ones. The limit is enforced server-side, so it can't be bypassed.
A Note on How These Features Got Here
A few of these additions came directly from conversations with people using QuizLab Pro in production. That's genuinely how I'd prefer the extension to develop - real use cases surface requirements that are easy to overlook when you're building in isolation. If you're using QuizLab Pro and there's something that would make it work better for your situation, get in touch.
What's Coming in v2
The updates in this post are all about making individual quizzes work better. The next major release is going to take a step back and think about what happens when you have more than one quiz to manage.
The feature I'm working toward is Quiz Series - a way to group multiple quizzes into an ordered programme. The use cases are broader than they might first appear: a school running monthly rounds with a combined end-of-year leaderboard, an organisation with a structured onboarding path where each quiz unlocks the next, a compliance programme where all assessments need to be completed by a deadline. Right now QuizLab Pro handles each of those quizzes well individually, but there's no way to connect them or track progress across the whole programme.
Quiz Series would add that layer - grouping, progression rules, combined scoring, and a leaderboard that spans the whole series — while staying Joomla-native and not trying to become a full LMS. It's still in development, but it's the direction v2 is heading.
If that's something you'd use, or you have a specific use case in mind, feel free to get in touch. The features in this post exist partly because people did exactly that.
QuizLab Pro is available to download from the extensions page. There's also a live demo if you want to see it in action before committing.