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By ejackson on
I teach several Marketing classes at university. Some of my courses are directed to engineers and programmers who create new technologies. (Let's call those new technologies "widgets" in the generic, not web 2.0 terms.)
I strongly believe that anyone who creates anything with the intention of selling it or having it find wide adoption should make the time to identify who might use their widget. Better yet, identify this target market and actually go to the trouble of asking those targeted users a few questions about their needs and the specific functionality they are looking for.
I am often asked by my students how to best do this. "Can you recommend a good online survey tool". Based on visibility in the marketplace, my answer is typically:
- www.surveymonkey.com
- www.zoomerang.com
- www.questionpro.com
- www.surveygizmo.com
In this forum, I have also seen a recommendation for:
- www.stellarsurvey.com
I have personally used SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang for class surveys. (e.g "quality control" surveys such as "How did you like my lecture on a scale of 0-5 where 0 means you thought it sucked and 5 means you loved it.") I find these are both excellent tools, but have limitations, especially if you try to use the "free" version. I have noted in this forum that SurveyMonkey has been used to survey the Drupal developer community.
My search for an open source tool has brought me to:
- www.limesurvey.org
In an ideal world, I would like to find a Drupal module that addresses my pain, that of my students and that of the Drupal community ("pain" in this case being the need for a relatively sophisticated online survey tool.)
Before I invest a lot of time trying to integrate Lime Survey into my Drupal class websites, I thought it would be a good idea to share my pain and research with the Drupal community. This to see if there is a Drupal module that we all might use and contribute to the development of.
Thoughts?
Comments
At the risk of insulting
At the risk of insulting your intelligence and mine as well, I thought I would mention that Drupal does have a poll feature. It sounds like you are looking for something on a completely different level though.
No insult taken re: Online Surveys and Drupal Polling Module
I am familiar with the poll module of Drupal 5.6. It is a very simple survey tool that allows for multiple choice questions. I have not yet upgraded to 6.0, so will check for significant upgrades. Thank you.
Are you familiar with the features and functionality of www.surveymonkey.com and www.limesurvey.org? These are a different class of survey tool that offer an extensive range of surveying features.
Note: You have not provided enough information to assess intelligence quotient. If you were in one of my classes, I would give you credit for class participation, but wouldn't be able to give you credit for drawing a conclusion based on thoughtful research. D-
OK, I did glance at one or
OK, I did glance at one or both of the sights you mentioned, but I really am not familiar with them. Of course, I don't know what features you are looking for either -if you want to replicate their functionality, duplicate a subset, or have something with an extended feature set. I just noticed that they are pretty advanced technologically and sociologically compared to the nice, but simplistic poll module.
I am hoping you will grade me on the curve and I might come up with a C-. ;-)
Add Poll
I agree with @lhtown, You should let people decide who is the best online survey tool. There are many like Distro, Surveyomonkey, etc. People also recommend which they know in this way we can make it transparent.
=-=
investigate the survey.module and possibly the webform.module in the downloads area.
Survey and WebForm Modules vs. Surveymonkey or Lime Survey
Investigation (homework) completed prior to posting the question. Conclusion: Neither survey nor webform modules in 5.6 offer equivalent features or functionality to the more sophisticated survey-taking utilities out there in the cloud. For those with similar needs to those I outlined above, it looks like www.limesurvey.org is the best fit for now as it is comprehensive and it is open source. It's also not well documented, so anticipate some pain.
webform module
Recommend you try the webform module. It was used in a recent survey site for the Radiohead album launch.
http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com
The survey was setup using the webform module and there's a discussion here about how it was done. I've tried the webform module and the scope for the type of surveys you can set up are endless, but, the more sophisticated the survey becomes, the more work that has to go into processing the results data.
At least, I can't see anything the surveymonkey or limesurvey can do that the webform modules + a bit of planning couldn't do.
phil
Webform+Weform_Report is still pretty incomplete...
... when compared to an actual survey application. It does not afford any skip logic (which is pretty important), pagination is tricky, and webform_report doesn't actually do anything (as far as I can see) other than spit out a kind of dumb table of results.
So as far as I can see, Drupal is still without a survey solution.
I've been frustrated by
I've been frustrated by this, too.
I think some of the responses to this post confuse "surveys" with "polls". A simple poll can be a single question; but hardly anybody uses the term "survey" that way. Surveys normally entail multiple questions which may be of multiple types (multiple choice, short answer, single-choice, etc.). It's a widely-accepted best practice to break up surveys into chunks, even limiting them to one question per page.
Web-based survey tools, both open-source and free tools like Survey Monkey et al, generally afford a means of presenting the results as graphs or tables.
Webform can be used to cook surveys, but it affords no means of presenting the results and offhand I don't recall that it has any way of paginating survey text. There's not really a secure way that I can think of, that doesn't require some significant permissions tweaking, to present the data in a table.
So in short, to the casual observer, Drupal does not afford a means of presenting surveys. Considering the Civicspace involvement, this is a really peculiar fact.
I forgot skip logic; and simplicity is important
Most survey applications these days support at least some degree of skip logic. That is, you can skip (or, often, include) questions based on the answers to other questions.
I'm sure one could hack together something that could be tabulated by a combination of webform_report and Excel manipulation, but that would utterly, completely miss the point of using a survey application: You want something that doesn't force you to rebuild the car every time you want to go to the grocery store. Right now, that's where we're at with Drupal 5 and surveys, as far as I can tell.
(This is causing me aggitta right now because I'm trying to do a survey, and I've realized that in order to present the results, I'm going to have to close the survey and use Excel (or a hand calculator). Great.
..
is the charts module of any use?
http://drupal.org/project/charts
I imagine that might be used in combination with the webform.module and webform reports.module,
Charts is 6.x only and not straightforward
What's needed is a straightforward survey tool. The bottom line is that creating surveys and showing survey results in Drupal 5 or non-Civicspace Drupal 4.x requires significant integration time and skill, by comparison with third party tools or outsourced providers.
I don't have an immediately elegant answer, BUT ...
I'll throw in my two cents.
Limesurvey (previously PHPSurveyor) looks very impressive and has a huge feature set. As it sounds (and looks) like a viable solution, I'll proceed in talking about Limesurvey. I'm not aware of a Drupal module, but have seen mention of a Joomla module called "Joosurvey". I've not worked with Joomla, but it may be a quite reasonable amount of work to port that module to Drupal.
Looking at the Limesurvey site today, though, gave me pause: Limesurvey is written using CakePHP. Drupal has a module (drake) that will allow CakePHP applications to run in "Drupal-space". I'm thinking out loud here, but it may be the case that Limesurvey would run under drake.
Worst-case scenario, wouldn't it be possible to write some custom PHP code that would call the appropriate survey and move this code into a block?
Sorry I can't be more immediately helpful -
C
i would love to see
I would love to see something like this implemented....
thanks for the efforts
Drupal and Limesurvey
cpilson .. I like the cut of your jib .. excellent. If we could get a block developed that would be a great achievement imho. Limesurvey 2 is in development and as you say is indeed being written using CakePHP
Two solutions but neither really what you want
I recently completed a survey for a government department and used the online "professional" version of "surveymethods.com". I had checked out survey monkey and several others (could provide the list if you want) but most of them are not very useful, especlially the free ones. For instance -- Survey monkey -- and most of the others including surveymethods allow you to do only 10 or 12 questions on the free version, will not allow skip logic, and have very little in the way of ability to do the calculations.
My main reason for the one I chose is that it enabled me to do a direct invitation by email, restricts the respondent to a single instance of the survey, and let me add some population characteristics (branch, type of job, etc.) which are picked up as fields even though the identity of the user can be hidden. That facility makes 2 or 3 questions unnecessary. It also does a variety of reports and breakdowns, but I simply exported the data (you can export to csv or excel and use it in SPSS or SAS for instance).
However, my point is that in searching for a piece of software, I came across something called "survey fly" which is a plugin for Wordpress. It was never implemented beyond version 0.7, and does not have skip logic, but it works quite smoothly. It has all the usual question forms, and would have allowed me to do a bilingual survey (which I needed) using css. You simply install it, manage the survey through the WP admin panel, and include a special link code in one of the blog posts. I think it could be tweaked withpout too much problem, but I didn't have the time & paid for a 2 month rental of the commercial survey methods program (well worth it, by the way) to handle the project.
If you have time and like to tweak you might check it out. I don't have the address handy by you could use google or search wordpress plugins for a reference to "survey fly". If I did use it in drupal I would set up a separate WP installation and just provide a link in drupal (and maybe an automated link back when the survey is done)
I traded emails with product
I traded emails with product managers at SurveyMonkey and Vertical Response about four years ago, about what a great idea it would be if they could integrate opt-in email with SM or surveys with VR. (I was bidding a project that would marry a survey with opt-in email.) They both agreed it would be, but fessed that it wasn't on the radar.
Both were "hot" at the time -- hard to beat on price, reasonably good feature sets for the money when you did pay for them. Neither of them has changed noticeably in the intervening years.
I think they're both examples of being hurt by their own success. Their prices are just so low that there's no R&D budget left, so they can't add new features that would get them more customers -- or, more to the point, better-paying customers.
ah there is the key phrase
ah there is the key phrase I'm looking for "restricts the respondent to a single instance of the survey".
and as well I would like respondents to be able to stop and continue later or edit there responses.
I'm making my respondents become members of my Drupal site, so I've been playing with a custom Node type, but it's a lot of work and not scalable to future surveys (applications in my case).
still searching for a good solution, but I think I may just have to give up and use LimeSurvey, but I'd rather use the user accounts that already exist in my drupal site, and drive more people to join that rather than a one time Survey.
Things got quite on this thread, so I assume no magic solution came up?
Hal Eagar
Software Architect
hal.eagar@door3.com
magic solutions are better than work
haleagar -- I noticed your recent comment -- I Haven't actually been following this thread (yes it got quiet a while ago) but still thinking about a module specifically for drupal & just looked it up. The "restricts respondent" would not be that difficult (I think) and is one of the places where all the web surveys (and "polls") actually fall down. But if your survey is limited to members of your drupal site, the restriction would be easy -- just raise a flag when the userID pops up. It would only be problematic if you wanted to ensure that users felt comfortable that you were not tracking their responses specifically -- if you are really into accuracy, that could skew the results.
The survey I mentioned in my original reply was handled by sending an invitation to a specific mailing list, with a randomly coded login key. The key could only be used once, and unless you mistakenly sent the same person another message they wouild only be able to go at it once. (They were able to back out in the middle and finish it later, however, as the response was kept in limbo until it was finally submittted by the surveyee.)
If I did any work on this kind of module, however, it would be for the fun of it -- most of the sites using drupal would be unlikely to want anything other than the "poll" type quick count, more as an interesting filler for visitors than for serious statistical information. I can see further applications (& would like to do some), but I'd have to weigh the fun against the work.
subscribe
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Quiz Module
Someone just suggested the Quiz module to me:
http://drupal.org/project/quiz
I commented in response that I couldn't recall it coming up in discussions of surveys in Drupal. So now it has. Useful?
Also looking for a good
Also looking for a good Drupal Survey solution.
Subscribing, greetings, Martijn
=-=
The webform.module can be used for surveys and replaced the survey.module.
me too
this would be cool. any work being done or plans for this?
Vote for LimeSurvey
Here is a vote for trying to get some kind of integration and/or bridge for LimeSurvey. Having just run through the demos and documentation, this thing looks pretty solid. Appears to do everything Survey Monkey can do, and has a few other tricks up its sleeve as well.
Not sure if a full module-rific integration is in order, or just an easy way to bridge your user base and themes to an existing LimeSurvey installation (haven't looked at the install process enough to know how involved it is). But among the Open Source survey tools I have seen this one seems by far the most "complete."
There also is a site called http://www.limeservice.com/ which offers a hosted version. Perhaps the Drupal community can work with them to develop an API?
Also very interested in surveys in Drupal
1. subscribing to thread
2. Investigating limesurvey integration!
Count me in too
I am going to have to implement this puppy one way or another, so would really love to see something robust happen in the way of a survey/graphical reporting integrated module. It's kind of amazing that this doesn't already exist. What an opportunity! I wish I were a better PHP coder...
Cheering section for any coders out there who want to work on it? How about Google Summer of Code 2009!?
Rah Rah,
Kelly
-Kelly Bell
twitter: @kelly, @gothamdrupal
http://gothamcitydrupal.com
Hi, The quiz module looks
Hi,
The quiz module looks promissing related to survey building. Matt is really making a beauty out of it. May be you would like to join him in his effort?
Greetings,
Martijn
if you appreciate e-development work, please place a link from your site to www.trekking-world.com
me too
I also need a good survey tool in drupal - webform isn't flexible enough I think..
subscribe!
I'd also love to see
I'd also love to see something with the power and flexibility of SurveyMonkey evolve as a module option for Drupal. I look forward to whatever comes out of this.
If we need to chip in some cash to help things flow or get the ball rolling, I'm sure we could put together many of us and make it worth a developer's time.
In the meantime, I guess I'll check out quiz, webform and survey.
Me as well...
Just a user bridge would do to prevent the user from having to log-in multiple times (from Drupal to LimeSurvey). This would help tremendously for seamlesness.
Still thinking that quiz
Still thinking that quiz would ne the awesome solution. The quiz-maintainer have said to me being busy right now with developing.
Please help him if you can! www.drupal.org/project/quiz
Greetings,
Martijn
another vote for LimeSurvey and an offer to pay
I've been using LimeSurvey for the past year and a half, and it's great. I want the following integration
1) sync tokens tables with drupal user base
2) present list of surveys, with an indication of whether the user has completed them or not
I'll pay someone to develop this -- please make an offer!
-Ista
wait
I looked into this and it looks like it'd not be smart to create an integration now. This is because limesurvey 1.x has kind of a chaotic codebase (the developers agree on this), and they are working on a complete rewrite based on cake-php.
This will undoubtedly become the best open source php survey tool out there, but since it's still in alpha a lot could change. If someone where to make an integration with limesurvey v1 it'd be a lot of work and would probably take about a year to complete.
My suggestion is to either wait for drupal7 and limesurvey2 (at least an rc) or create something from scratch using drupal as the framework. The second would have the big advantage of not having to use the bloated cakephp framework and the possibility to fully use the translation, hooks, formapi and other stuff drupal offers.
Hi,Quiz is going in the
Hi,
Quiz is going in the right direction. Except multiple choice where all four answers can be right, but only one out of four can be chosen is not supported yet. www.drupal.org/project/quiz
greetings, Martijn
quiz
Quiz or webforms might be a good starting point for a survey, but it has a long way to go if it wants to be a survey.
Some things a survey would need:
Conditions to show or not show a question (if another question is answered/answered with, php code)
Points per answer (There isn't a "right" answer, but there can be points assigned to answers)
some more question formats
required/non-required fields
secured with tokens instead of permissions
maybe statistics in a separate module
Especially the conditions, required/non-required and the fact that there is no "right" answer are important.
I'll take a look at the quiz module to see if it is possible to make another module to add this.
Hi, great if you would
Hi, great if you would participate in quiz. I believe they would very much like the multiple choice questiontype on there new framework, other types are on that already I believe, and than you both could move on to get these requirements working!
greetings, Martijn
I don't think starting with
I don't think starting with the quiz module is a good idea. I just looked at the webform module and it seems to have a lot more potential as a survey module.
Surveys should be anonymous and there are no correct answers.
Hi, the problem with webform
Hi, the problem with webform is that the output will not be nodes, and not easy to use with other modules.
Quiz output will be nodes and easy to use as such. That's why I think quiz is better option.
greetings, Martijn
subscribing.
subscribing.
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dynamic content
Webform almost works for my needs, but has one huge missing feature: dynamic content. This is a CMS: all the data I need to for my questions already exists in (CCK) nodes on my site, and yet there is no way to dynamically create the webforms. Not that I have found, anyway. Webform is a useful but very limited tool. This is what it needs to let it take advantage of drupal. Any idea what would be involved in bringing in data from CCK or taxonomy? I'd be willing to work on it if it seems doable and someone familiar with the module points the way.
Also have a look at
Also have a look at http://drupal.org/project/quiz
You can maybe use this too...
_
This is not the use case for webforms which don't create or interact with nodes (by design). The previous poster is correct-- see the quiz module.
subscribing
I am going to try and attempt using the webform module for a voting platform for an organization. I have used it before and was able to customize to do whatever I needed, so I am hoping that this will be the case for this poll. I tried the limesurvey and although it was pretty easy to use, I was not so easy to skin and I need it to integrate into a site. I'll try to post the progress.
subscribing... Would love to
subscribing... Would love to use Drupal for Facebook integrated with a robust survey tool for my dissertation... :(
Decisions Module
The Decisions Module (http://drupal.org/project/decisions) is a polling and survey module with excellent advanced functionality for those who need more functionality than the Poll module provides.
_______
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Subscribe
Subscribing to follow this thread... I will be working on integrating surveys this week and will decide between quiz and webform modules. I don't currently need a super fancy survey mechanism and don't want to integrate with a non-drupal system.
Kristen
-Kristen
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristenpol
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://kristen.org/book
Subscribing
would love to get Drupal-based surveying as well.
www.drupal.org/project/quiz ?
www.drupal.org/project/quiz ? isn't that sufficient?
greetings, Martijn
so have we reached a
so have we reached a decision? :p
sorry just need to ask which is a more feasible option for surveys? Im pretty new to drupal
integrating limesurvey with drupal
Hello -
We're doing a project that would really benefit from integrating limesurvey user/reg with drupal. If anyone wants to partner on getting this done professionally, we'd be interested! Otherwise we'll have to find a vendor and do it on our own!
thanks, Dave
Anonymity
I would think most use-cases would require the survey to be submitted anonymously, but the quiz module does not support that afaik.
subscribing
Looking to stay in the loop on survey options.
Subscribing too
Full featured survey module is much needed.
Challenge accepted
Unless I find a better solution in the next hours, I'm going to tackle the Drupal Survey thing myself. I've used LimeSurvey for other projects, but this time I need to modify it heavily, and since LS's code is not the best start (code is very messy), I'm going to use Drupal as the foundation.
It's going to be a two or three week sprint. I'll keep you posted, it would be great to get feedback from others.
Ready To Help!
@nelovishk
We have a survey on limeask.com but never was able to use it since no connection to drupal.
Do like LS but want a Drupal way to do this easily. So if I can help you in anyway by testing, etc please let me know.
I am not a coder but can help with documentation - If you are going to make this a contrib module.
Let me know and appreciate your support for all of the drupal world.
Webform
I'll write a blog post about this to share my findings. A good start is the webform module. Webform doesn't have all the features LimeSurvey has, but is a good foundation for creating complex survey functionality on Drupal.
So far, I'm using Webform, Webform Reports, Webform Conditional and a couple of modules I'm developing:
I'd like to know, those who subscribe this idea including OP (if it's still relevant after four years...), what features that aren't covered by these modules already would you like to have?
http://drupal.org/project/webform
http://drupal.org/project/webform_report
http://drupal.org/project/webform_conditional (This one could be merged with Webform in the future. See this issue #732114: Merge Webform Conditional into Webform (support for same-page conditional fields))
Features
Glad to see your post!
I am not certain what you mean by "OP"?
For features it would be very helpful if the following feature set was possible.
For our use case we are trying to get feed back on travel tours - I have a mockup I can share with you privately if you like to see it to get some more ideas on how we would make use.
Thanks again,
Hg
Most of them are there already
Hello,
OP stands for Original Poster ;)
I hope this is useful!
Thanks
Thanks for the replies.
See lots of already ;-)
The idea for 3 was if we build a profile for the person taking the survey based on what tour or products the bought then the survey would be more focused as our goal is more about client feedback.
Thanks,
Harley
New module : LimeSurvey Synchronization
I have created a new and powerfull survey module integrating the LimeSurvey software !
It is already a beta release. It's just for Drupal 6 by now but the Drupal 7 version will come.
Project page :
http://drupal.org/project/1460746
and a demosite to test it without installing :
http://www.drupal-limesurvey-synchronization.com
Need beta testers !
[edit : demo site fixed.]
I'll test it out
Just find it odd, the original poster hasn't responded since 2008? :-)
The LimeSurvey Sync module is
The LimeSurvey Sync module is available as stable version on Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 !
Note : Project page has changed, it is :
http://drupal.org/project/limesurvey_sync
The demosite has been upgraded to the drupal 7 version :
http://www.drupal-limesurvey-synchronization.com
Looks great!
Looks great!