ah .. so much to know :) .. thank you so much for your thoughts ..
My quizzing platform is to be like this:
Landing page where you type in name and click "Start Test"
When you click "Start Test" the following happens:
1. Countdown timer starts in right hand corner above sidebar (or somewhere else visible)
2. a timestamp (say ts1) is generated
3. You navigate to Question no.1
Answer the Question no.1 (this choice is recorded in a the field of a state tiddler) and click "Next Question"
When you click "Next Question" the following happens:
1. a timestamp (say ts2)is generated
2. You navigate to Question no.2
Now ts2 - ts1 will give the time taken to answer question 1
So on...
All this while .. the countdown timer (above sidebar) continues and if it becomes 00:00 then irrespective of how many questions are left to be answered it takes you to the "Submit Answers" tiddler which once pressed will do the following:
1. check the answers submitted with an answer key and sort out neatly the answers answered correctly/wrongly/unanswered and you can check out the solutions for each
2. calculate the score
3. send the score and the submitted answers to a google spreadsheet by way of the submit form plugin (by Jed? i guess)
So once all have taken the test a ranking can be developed from the data collected in the google sheet and published ....
But a countdown plugin can have much more usecases .. for example in the ToDoNow itself we can start a task and the timer starts and once the task is complete the timer stops and is recorded
Or even in the Kanban plugin the time a task spent in any category can be noted down etc....
you are right .. much thought must be spent on making a countdown plugin as universal as possible .. looking at all possible use cases ..