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By Phillip Mc on
A pal emailed me about this earlier. it's a very basic drupal site (unmistakable- they're using the minelli theme and it looks like the webforms module) to carry out a survey to see what price Radiohead Fans chose to pay for the new album which is due out in 2 days.
Here's a link to the Drupal driven survey site: http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com
For anyone living under a rock for the past week, Radiohead decided to let people decide the price of the album download on their official site. Which means you can choose anything from £0.00 up to £99.00 (I think) to pre-order the new album, which is due out on wed of this week.
Philk
P.S. I paid £5.
Comments
Drupal rocks
Record of the Day are a client of mine and they asked for a quick survey site last week...no time for design so I just went with the neutral looking grey minelli fixed width theme.
I have to say, Drupal and the webform.module and webform_report.modules are superb modules for doing something like this. It took about 2 hours from the site being registered to the site going live and accepting submissions.
The BBC ran a piece on it this morning...and I think the Guardian is running something tomorrow, as is the LA Times. The full survey results will be published soon..
For anyone who is interested, the running average price is £4.00 (about USD$7.00) from about 5,000 submissions over the past few days. The album is superb, by the way and I can't see many being disappointed.
It's an "honesty box" survey and obviously not as good as the figures from Radiohead.com..but it's the comments that are so interesting..i.e. why people chose the price they did. Fair enough, some are very sanctimonious and I wonder how many of those £0.01 people would throw 1 penny in a buskers hat as they walked past...but, overall the comments are very compelling.
What Price Did YOU Choose? | Sample Comments & Prices
The great thing about the webform module is that it allowed us to change the copy and questions mid-stream - while the site was live.
The simplenews.module was added on later to handle opt-in subscriptions for the Radiohead results and I obviously made sure there was a plug for Drupal up there as well.
Dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
nice idea
Very timely website. It'd be nice if it actually displayed the current results after you voted, though.
--
John Forsythe
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considered that.
I agree with you. That would have been much better and it was considered, but, a statistics expert recommended not to do it that way..because some would go back and bump/drop the figures, whatever the case maybe.
There was also a few (very few to be honest) abusive and crude comments from people who obviously didn't like radiohead. The BBC and many newspapers like the Telegraph, Guardian, LA Times and others are linking across to the site and Record of the Day wanted to maintain their integrity as a publisher. So, in hindsight it was a good move...on a few levels.
If anyone is interested - the Average price worked out at £3.88 (full results to follow)..
However, it's not just the price and the obvious industry interest (Record of the Day is primarily a music Industry trade magazine)....the comments left by people taking part in the survey are truly stunning.....or as Nancy Baym (from Onlinefandom.com) put it;
.
Dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
if anyone is interested
Hi guys,
If anyone is interested, the Radiohead In Rainbows What Price Did You choose results have been published at the following address: http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com
As an aside, we checked with Radioheads' music publishers (Warner chappell) and they confirmed that the overall price per download matched the figures they have very closely. Doing a by country comparison isn't really valid because the majority of the votes came from the UK and USA.
That said, the figures are there so you can draw your own conclusions. The real beef of the survey are the comments, which are incredibly interesting.
Drupal handled everything brilliantly....I'm using Views.module, cck.module along with the book.module. So it's quite light as a site.
Dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
looks good
looks really good. some of those comments are very funny. The rationale behind some of the prices is interesting though.
I really like the clean layout. What theme are you using/did you use as a base?
phil
hunchbaque
Thanks phil.
I think it was the hunchbaque theme, which like the Sympal theme is great as a starter theme.
dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
I guess I'm unclear on what
I guess I'm unclear on what this says about Drupal that's good.
I mean, it's fantastic that they were able to put up a quick poll (not really a survey, since it's only one page and employs no skip-logic) using webform, and it's nice that Webform can let you download the data, and it's nice that webform_report can create a node that lets you work around the permissions exposures of showing the tabular data from a form to, say, non-authenticated users.
But as far as I can see, webform_report does not actually afford the means to do anything with the presentation of the data other than show it in a table. This is still a long way from showing a real survey solution.
There are no 'Kitchen sink' modules here, this is Drupal.
the webform.module, to me, is a very simple and very easy to use survey creation tool. What you do with that data is the next step.
When you use Drupal for a while, you'll catch on that it's a modular approach. In other words, there are very few 'Kitchen sink' modules for Drupal. Instead you'll have a cooker.module, fridge.module, blender.module, sink.module, dishwasher.module and coffee_machine.module all doing their own respective thing.
on that point, have you looked at the webform_report.module?
http://drupal.org/project/webform_report
I remember seeing a blog post about it before, specifically theming the webform_report.module output to look like these charts and graphs http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php?menu=Gallery
Alternatively, you could support the Drupal Advanced Survey Module which sounds interesting.
edited: noticed after posting this that there is already a drupal swf chart module that integrates the charts and graphs listed here at maani.us into drupal.....it's called http://drupal.org/project/swfcharts
Well, that's a problem
Just dismissing the complaint that way indicates why Drupal has a problem with acceptance: It's difficult to actually do a lot of things that people want to do with a CMS.
You can wave-off the complaint by saying that people ought to have to work for what they get, but when all is said and done there's no way to post an actual bona-fide survey (not a webform-driven hack) that doesn't require significant effort and integration.
That's a problem in itself, but it's symptomatic of a larger problem: There tend to be few modules that deliver comprehensive solutions. For example, there's no module that does the things that one would normally want to do when creating a survey. Instead, you have to integrate it all for yourself. And you have to do it all over every time you want to do a new survey.
Nobody's looking for "kitchen sink." They're looking for something that pulls together the things that one would normally want to do to accomplish a task.
...
I'm not dismissing your complaint, escoles. I have pointed out the solution.
I just downloaded and tried out the webform.module. It's mind bogglingly simple to use and it I was able to setup and deliver a comprehensive survey in less time than I imagine it took you to type your complaint.
I haven't tried the webform-charts.module integration for the results data yet. Maybe I'll sit back and moan a lot in the hope that someone else will do it for me.
Just kidding. I'm way to busy at the moment. I have got a very itchy toe and I am interviewing people at the moment to scratch it for me.
Well, you are dismissing my
Well, you are dismissing my criticism. You're belittliing it, by using terms like "kitchen sink" and "complaint." Clearly you prefer the "build it as you go out of sheet steel and car parts" approach. The rest of us would prefer to drive a car. Or even a truck. Just not something we have to put together before we can drive it.
The point is not whether it's easy or difficult to create a webform. I've made lots of them. The point is that a webform is not a survey. The term "survey" in common use has certain connotations to which webforms do not obtain. In order to get an actual survey, you have to add more stuff and integrate it together. And again, you have to do that every time you want a survey.
(The Drupal survey module you linked to as interesting, before, suggesting I support it, doesn't exist, btw.)
...
Note that Philk and I are not best buds but now you are being rather sensitive and unfair here.
This original post was how someone was able to build a rapid solution to fill their needs and six months later you dig it up with what to me seems random complaints.
PhilK used an analogy to help explain Drupalisms and make things more clear. In the Drupalverse, complete one piece makes all packages are rare and in general not part of our community or culture. The entire point of Drupal is modular. PhilK tired to demonstrate that and his manner of doing so was in no way dismissive or belittling of you. I thought it rather well thought out and presented.
If these piece together solutions do not work for you (defined as rest of us) then there is probably a terminology, cultural or understanding gap at the root of it. I read his suggestion as more of a way to achieve your goals that if you want/need a one size needs repeatable fits all survey module solution then you are free to create and support it. I will point you to the quiz module as an existing one probably closer to your desires that does actually exist.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Interestingly, the Quiz
Interestingly, the Quiz module has never come up when I've gone looking for survey modules in the recent past. I may have found it the last time I was looking (which was about a year ago), but I don't recall. (If so, I would have been looking for a 4.x solution, and Quiz is said to be unstable on 4.x, so I probably wrote it off at the time.)
I'm not going to get into a dissection of language, but I do read the admonition as more snide than helpful. (Interviewing people to trim his toenails?) Yes, I'm a big boy, and yes I understand that software geeks are accustomed to using ridicule as a tool of discourse, but as I get older I'm less inclined to let it pass without comment. It's just about never useful, apologetics notwithstanding.