LimeSurvey

Infobox Software
name = LimeSurvey



caption =
author = The LimeSurvey Project Team
developer = Carsten Schmitz, Jason Cleeland (and others)
released = February 20, 2003
latest release version = 1.71+
latest release date = June 2, 2008
language = 49 Languages & Dialects
genre =
license = GNU General Public License
website = [http://www.LimeSurvey.org/ www.limesurvey.org]

LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open source online survey application written in PHP based on a MySQL, PostgreSQL or MSSQL database. It enables users without coding knowledge to develop, publish and collect responses to surveys.

Surveys can include branching, custom preferred layout and design (using a web template system), and can provide basic statistical analysis of survey results. Surveys can be either publicly accessible or be strictly controlled through the use of "once-only" tokens for each survey participant. Additionally results can be anonymous be separation of participants data and result data, even for controlled surveys. [http://www.LimeSurvey.org/content/view/41/55/lang,en/]

Numerous web hosting services offer LimeSurvey hosting, either as a custom installation or through a control panel, such as cPanel with Fantastico [http://netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php] , Plesk [http://www.swsoft.com/en/products/plesk/addons/#app-lin] and Virtualmin Professional. [http://www.virtualmin.com/news/item?item_id=58722] LimeSurvey has also been ported by third parties to various content management systems, such as PostNuke [http://noc.postnuke.com/projects/pn-phpsurveyor/] , XOOPS [http://www.xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1904] and Joomla [http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,3373/Itemid,35/] .

International features

LimeSurvey is available in more than 49 languages and dialects and it uses a UTF-8 character set. Primary translations include: Albanian, Basque, Chinese, Croation, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and many other partial translations. [http://www.LimeSurvey.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,79/lang,en/]

History

LimeSurvey was registered as a SourceForge.net project called PHPSurveyor on February 20, 2003 and was written by Australian software developer Jason Cleeland. The first public release, version 0.93, was published on March 5, 2003. [http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=257903] . The project quickly developed a large audience of users resulting from the development of advanced features such as branching (conditions), token control and templating.

In 2006 the project lead was given to Carsten Schmitz, a German IT project manager. On May 17, 2007 the project name was changed from PHPSurveyor to LimeSurvey to make software licensing easier by not including PHP in the name.On November 29, 2007 LimeSurvey won the 1st prize award at the Les Trophées du Libre contest in the category Corporate Management.

2.0

Right now, a team from all over the world is developing the brand new LimeSurvey 2.0. This will be a complete redesign. LimeSurvey 2.0 is completely re-written using an MVC (Model-View-Controller) approach and a powerful PHP framework (CakePHP). Design experts from the U.S. are working on a new and fresh design including latest Ajax technology.

Trivia

LimeSurvey is ranked highly on SourceForge.net, with an overall rank of 99 out of over 100,000 projects as of June 4, 2008. [http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/] It has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and its development status is listed as "5 - Production/Stable, 6 - Mature". [http://sourceforge.net/projects/limesurvey/]

In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, the Verified Voting Foundation used PHPSurveyor to gather data about voting irregularities. It identified over 13500 incidents in the first 10 hours of voting and was selected as part of their Election Incident Reporting System. [http://www.VerifiedVoting.org/article.php?id=5207]

The Korean translation has been created by a South Korean Cyber Crime Police Unit.

Limesurvey is used in many Higher Institutes to enable staff and students to administrate their own surveys.

External links

* [http://www.LimeSurvey.org LimeSurvey] - official site
* [http://SourceForge.net/projects/limesurvey/ SourceForge.net project site]
* [http://secunia.com/product/6691/ Vulnerability Report] from Secunia
* [http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaking/Aust-open-source-app-plays-role-in-US-poll/2004/11/03/1099362192234.html Article in The Age] News Article in Australian Daily Newspaper The Age on PHPSurveyor use
* [http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=513 PHPSurveyor: an appreciation] - ZDNet blog article
* [http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/unlvref/archives/000540.html PHPSurveyor: a questionable little script] - UNLV blog article
* [http://www.websm.org/index.php?fl=1&nt=2&m2w=Guides,%20codes,%20best%20practice&sid=1 Web Survey Methodology article]
* [http://www.linux.com/articles/62327 Simple polling with LimeSurvey] - Linux.com article on June 05, 2007