Thread:Project:Support desk/Possibility of turning MediaWiki into a tutoring program?/reply

It's possible, but may be a lot of work. (That would be true even if you were writing something from scratch too). Something like this would probably be of interest to various wiki education project (wikiversity and what not).

Lots of wikis use the Quiz extension. It creates self contained quizes, which is not really what you need, but it would be something you can maybe build off of. I would recomend studying that extension as a first step just to see how MediaWiki extensions work. (However that extension doesn't touch the db, which is something that what you're describing would have to do quite a bit. We have docs about db access at Manual:Database_access, extension:TitleKey is a fairly simple extension that does stuff with the databse which might be worth studying)

We also have a page Manual:Developing_extensions which will explain some of the basics of developing extensions. Beyond the basic docs, we also have doxygen docs at http://svn.wikimedia.org/doc/, which can be very useful when just begining.

PHP as a language is a little different from C++. However it is object orientied, and in general the transition from another object orientied language to PHP isn't too bad. http://php.net has very readable docs about php (but beware the user comment section of php.net sometimes has quite bad advice).

If you have any questions, or run into any trouble, don't hesitate to ask.