Let me ask you one question: If you had known before, how many hours needed to be invested to release such a theme, would you still do it?
When we started we thought this would be easy. The further we came, the more difficult the job seemed to be. Mainly because of two reasons:
- There is an immense amount of settings for many question types and survey configurations, which leads to thousands of different scenarios you may have to check. We thought that we used a fair part of what LimeSurvey has to offer, but as we proceeded, we saw that we have only scratched the surface.
- There is some inconsistency in which the HTML of different question types is set up, so we have had to rebuild question-HTML with javascript several times, which led to head aches, shouuting developers, nightmares and broken marriages.
We ended up spending 10 months longer and 15.000 euro more than anticipated and are still not finished. Each day we find out more settings and more user scenarios. We have to keep track of users that do an enourmous lot of programming and hacking themselves, but also we keep track of users that look at survey software for the first time. I can tell you nice anectotes on that.
We met several very friendly people, some users offering solutions we never thought of, we also met people that were even angry that we did not want to give away all code and sources that we had: "He, it's Open Source, isn't it?"
It looks like a journey into "terra incognita". We are glad that we have something now that we can use for designing clear surveys for our customers. We eneded up with a swiss army knife that has many more features than we needed and we also ended up having to conform with LimeSurvey design decisions that we would have done very differently. But OK.
We now have a free version that we wanted to share with the community for two main reasons:
- this way we give back something to a community that we owe a lot to, since we use LimeSurvey intensively for several projects
- setting it free will give uw a lot of interaction with people that have questions, which we can learn from
- it is a good promotion for the Premium template, which will be launched next week
We learned awfully much from this process, which makes us better developers than when we started. We also learned more about LimeSurvey and I sincerely hope that this Open Source project will be more open to wishes of users. We sometimes fear that LS is focussing too much on .... Yes, on what? We would very much like to know what the core team is focussing on, since they are very quiet. The most recent roadmap is from january 2013, which makes us uneasy.
LS has much potential, but that potential must be made true.
In the meantime, we go on... but we would like a more fundamental discussion about what LimeSurvey wants to be, for whom.
