Hi @ all,

I used the past weeks to solve a problem I had with this great Software: The Template!

So I nearly finished a completely redesign and used the very famous grid "Bootstrap" from Twitter for that. The benefits are a much more attractive design which is fully responsive. So it doesn't matter whether you use it on PC, Tablet or Smartphone.
There are still some small bugs left, but I would love to hear your opinions!

A demo is available here: lime.kw-blog.de/limesurvey/index.php

Thanks a lot!

Philipp

tried, it's the best template

Could just have a quick look, so specific feedback needs to wait. But it looks really great! Would be great if you could provide it (of course a neutral version of it) for the community. I think it has great potential to be one of the standard templates to be shipped with limesurvey.

How easy is it to adapt?

Look great!!
Love to see a fully responsive and good looking template like this one replace some of the dated standard templates.

After all, a really good looking template might also do wonders for the popularity of Limesurvey and compliance to surveys.

I totally agree with mfaber. Limesurvey is a very mighty tool and with the Expression Manager it became even mightier. I personally consider it as one of the best open source tools that exist. It is not so far away from professional tools.

But the layout and usability is not its stronghold. I think this scares away some potential users. Better templates would be a first step to solve this, next step would be a nicer interface / workflow, but this is a lot of work and has the potential that especially the current users might complain. Change is always a risk. But with the templates I think this should be fine.

The important part is that they are easily customizable. So basically that you can change the colors quickly without much knowledge of CSS and without having to dig too deep in the code.

Hi Philipp,
Yes it's a really good job

Very nice..well done..

Yes a VERY promising design. Please upload it to the templates repository - www.limesurvey.org/en/download-limesurve...vey-design-templates

Where can this template be downloaded?

Thank you.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. I really appreciate it.

The installation process of the theme is: "import" and add two .js files afterwards by uploading them separately. Because the import seems to skip .js files. Afterwards it is very easy to customize it. I'll add inline comments for every possible option.

It is also possible to switch the general look and feel by using Bootswatch templates ( bootswatch.com/ ). You just have to edit a single line. Or you could customize the whole look and feel by setting your own colors in the Bootstrap customization tool: getbootstrap.com/customize/
Of cause every element can laso be easily edited (and overwritten) by the regular .css file within the template.

I'm using WordPress since 7 years now and I think that LimeSurvey could learn from it's great success. Starting with this website (limesurvey.org) which has great content but is very difficult to handle. Many google search results to this website (in German) end in a 404 error and sometimes it's difficult to find the needed information. I would really recommend to have a relaunch for this website: E.g. by migrating to WordPress, BuddyPress and bbPress. (But that's another topic.)

So let's come back to the template. As (poor student I was thinking about selling a series of LimeSurvey templates which have premium features as the responsiveness, ... . On one side the already free existing templates are fine for anyone who just needs to build a basic survey. On the other side it will need much more work to make the surveys native usable on smartphones.
I believe in the open source philosophy and that's why I would donate a specific percentage of the income to the LimeSurvey community and I would be available to offer my help for a possible relaunch of limesurvey.org. Of cause as long the admins are interested in that.

So I'm asking myself: Is it fine to sell LimeSurvey templates as limesurvey-templates.com does? And is it ok to use the LS logo for that?

I'm very open for a discussion and again would love to hear your thoughts.

Best regards,

Philipp

Hi Philipp,

thanks for the additional info and a pity to hear you're considering not to make your work freely available. To be honest, for me it feels a bit unfair towards all the developers who invest their time and contributed other great features pretty much unconditionally for everyone else to use and build upon. The main difference I see between a template and other work is just a technical one in that templates can easily be distributed independently from the main software (sort of like a plugin). Otherwise...it's brain and time invested in code. Of course, it's your decision but imagine a plugin architecture for Limesurvey would be used by people to develop export plugins, question types etc, which are then all available for "a small fee" and without the benefits that open source has to offer. Limesurvey would not function the way it is.

I do appreciate your offer to contribute in a different form...but to me open source is not only free software but also software that can be developed further and provided back to the community where others can build on it...from which I benefit again. Thus, commercial add-ons are just far less attractive to me...

These are just my two cents and I do not want to judge any decision you might make...but may I still say I hope you will contribute your fine work back to the community? Besides fame, honor and thankful users, it's also good for the soul!

cheers!

my suggestion: open source, expand the user.sell your service to whom need your further development.
i do believe LS need a fully responsive templater for IPAD, IPHONE, ANDORID...