| Original author(s) | The LimeSurvey project team |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Carsten Schmitz, Jason Cleeland (and others) |
| Initial release | February 20, 2003 |
| Stable release | 1.91+ / April 5, 2011 |
| Available in | 59 languages & dialects |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www.limesurvey.org |
LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open source online survey application written in PHP based on a MySQL, PostgreSQL or MSSQLdatabase, distributed under the GNU General Public License[1]. Designed to be user-friendly, it enables users to develop and publish surveys, and collect responses, without doing any coding.
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LimeSurvey is a web application that is installed to the user’s server. After installation to the user's server, users can manage LimeSurvey from a web-interface. Users can use rich text in questions and messages, using a rich text editor, and images and videos can be integrated into the survey. The layout and design of the survey can be changed by modifying the template. Templates can be changed in a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Additionally, templates can be easily imported and exported through the template editor. Once a survey is finalized, the user can activate it, making it available for respondents to view and answer. Likewise, questions can also be imported and exported through the editor interface. LimeSurvey has no limit on the number of surveys a user can create, nor is there a limit on how many participants can respond. Aside from technical and practical constraints, there is also no limit on the number of questions each survey may have[2].
Questions are added in groups. The questions within each group are organized on the same page. Surveys can include a variety of question types that take many response formats, including multiple choice, text input, drop-down lists, numerical input, slider input, and simple yes/no input. Questions can be arranged in a two-dimensional array, with options along one axis based on the questions on the other axis. Questions can depend on the results of other questions. For instance, a respondent might only be asked about transportation for his or her commute if he or she responded affirmatively to a question about having a job[3].
LimeSurvey also offers several more advanced features. It provides basic statistical and graphical analysis of survey results. Surveys can either be publicly accessible or be strictly controlled through the use of "once-only" tokens, granted only to selected participants. Additionally, participants can be anonymous, or LimeSurvey can track the IP addresses of the participants. A much more detailed listing of features can be found on the LimeSurvey web page [1].
Numerous web hosting services offer LimeSurvey hosting, either as a custom installation or through a control panel, such as cPanel with Fantastico [4], Plesk [5] and Virtualmin Professional[6]. LimeSurvey has also been ported by third parties to various content management systems, such as PostNuke, and XOOPS [7]. A port to Joomla exists, but it is not compatible with version 1.5 of Joomla. [8] The main developer and project leader of the LimeSurvey project, Carsten Schmitz, is also the owner of LimeService, a company which offers LimeSurvey hosting for a small fee. This service is similar to web applications such as SurveyMonkey; the main difference being that LimeService's fees are based on the number of people that respond to the survey and not on the time that the survey is active for, like other similar services. LimeService offers up to 25 free responses per month, after which responses can be purchased in one of several packages[9].
Both the frontend and backend of LimeSurvey are available in more than 50 languages and dialects; 22 of these have over 95% of the translations done. It uses an UTF-8 character set. Primary translations include: Albanian, Basque, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish. There are also many other partial translations in other languages [10].
LimeSurvey has a variety of applications. It allows users to create and host high quality surveys, ideal for general data gathering purposes. It can be used in many different areas for collecting data from customers and employees. [11].
LimeSurvey is used by several notable organizations, such as the Austrian Vorarlberg State Government, Ars Electronica, and several open source organizations such as OpenOffice.org, Ubuntu, and GNOME[12]. LimeSurvey is also used by a large number of educational institutions around the world[13].
LimeSurvey was registered as a SourceForge.net project called PHPSurveyor on February 20, 2003 and was originally written by the Australian software developer Jason Cleeland. The first public release, version 0.93, was published on March 5, 2003. The project quickly developed a large audience of users after the development of advanced features such as branching (conditions), token control and templating.
In 2004, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, PHPSurveyor was used 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 [14].
In early 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 in order to make software licensing easier by not including PHP in the name.
In late 2008, a LimeSurvey hosting service named LimeService was created by LimeSurvey project leader Carsten Schmitz. It hosts LimeSurvey for users for a small fee per response.
As of June 4, 2008, LimeSurvey is ranked highly on SourceForge.net, with an overall rank of 99 out of over 100,000 projects as of June 4, 2008[15]. It has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and its development status is listed as "5 - Production/Stable, 6 - Mature"[16]. In 2009, LimeSurvey participated in the Google Summer of Code, a program encouraging students older than 18 years old to work on projects aimed at helping open-source projects. The student projects helped develop the interface and statistical modules of the upcoming LimeSurvey 2.0[17]. In 2010, LimeSurvey once again participated in Google Summer of Code. Students developed a Database Storage Engine for LimeSurvey 2.0, and implemented the much demanded “File upload question” type[18]. In November, LimeSurvey also participated in the Google Code-in, a similar program rewarding high school students to contribute to open source projects[19]. Tasks ranged from improving LimeSurvey’s Wikipedia pages to enhancing the user interface. LimeSurvey will also participate in the 2011 Google Summer of Code. As of 2010, LimeSurvey has 2,944 weekly downloads on SourceForge[20], and an Alexa traffic rank of 32,633[21].
The LimeSurvey development team is currently developing a new LimeSurvey 2.0 version. The code base for LimeSurvey 2.0 is being completely re-written from scratch using a MVC (Model-View-Controller) approach and the Yii PHP framework. Besides the structural code changes for better modularity the new version will also have a much more accessible GUI with a complete new design using AJAX technology - modularity and GUI accessibility are major points in which the current 1.x version is currently lacking.
In December 2007, LimeSurvey won the first place Les Trophées du Libre award in the category Enterprise Management. The Les Trophées du libre contest recognizes innovative and promising open-source projects. In 2008 LimeSurvey was nominated in the category Best Project for the Enterprise [22] in the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2008.