tammo wrote: They have to use the template editor. This routine is defined rather rough, since it forces template developers into making a mess os the template root. We rather use several directories for different sort of files.

A good folder/mediamanager which allows to control every uploaded file. To have all relevant images and other assets together in a folder structure would be nice. There are a lot of issues around the file handling.
When cloning a survey, uploaded files via survey editor are not cloned/copied to the new survey folders.
I would see a copy of a template inside that survey folder. Assets like Fonts and Media are sometimes Part of Template or part of the survey. Other survey packages use a folder concept when jumping between different surveys. Currently uploaded files by the user won't be deleted if the survey is deleted from the system too. Is beyond the scope of this thread but the awareness of files used and linked in a template and survey is hard to reach.

Maybe an idea like in Drupal:

Each Drupal installation comes with several standard themes (Drupal-language for templates). Each user can also add themes. This can be done in several ways, of which two are relevant here:
1. add them to the sites/all/themes directory, to make them available to all websites in the Drupal installation (in the case of LimeSurvey that would be in /upload/templates to all surveys)
2. add them to site/website.name/themes to make them available to just that one website (parallel to one survey in upload/{SID}/templates)

I would love that LimeSurvey in it's structure could be more flexible. Do you think that that could be discussed (and heard by the developers)?

tammo wrote: Do you think that that could be discussed (and heard by the developers)?

I have a very bad track record when it comes to feature requests with Limesurvey. I have given up on feature requests. Since there is no roadmap and the money is in customizing Limesurvey I won't expect anything. The main reason for using Limesurvey is control over hosting. SaaS users won't stick with Limesurvey. The competitor field has too much investor money at hand.

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?

@jelo, @tammo - I remind both of you that LS is open source maintained and developed by volunteers. You are welcome to code and submit pull requests if you think you can improve it.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. this way we give back something to a community that we owe a lot to, since we use LimeSurvey intensively for several projects
2. setting it free will give uw a lot of interaction with people that have questions, which we can learn from
3. 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.

Hi TPartner,

thanks for your comment.

We have submitted some pull requests, not many, I have to admit.

We thought that we could focus on something we very clearly needed ourselves and give that to the community, so people that see use to it can use it. Which we did. Hence the free template. We did that as volunteers.

But I guess a more strategic brainstorm is needed, before pull requests can be made. Hopefully you, and others in the core team are having those strategic brainstorm, as a user on distance, I would very much like to hear in what direction LimeSurvey is heading.

Tammo

tpartner wrote: @jelo, @tammo - I remind both of you that LS is open source maintained and developed by volunteers. You are welcome to code and submit pull requests if you think you can improve it.

Thanks Tony, happy to get the chance to get an answer from an informed member of the LimeSurvey Team.

Do you think an opposed feature request will be supported when I deliver the code to the opposed feature request? If there is no roadmap or mission statement, you don't know if your feature wish/request is completely out of scope. I am not here demotivate people or demanding to fulfill my feature requests. When discussions about features are like e.g. this

www.limesurvey.org/en/forum/future-featu...tallation-per-survey

I am unsure how to carry on. What would be the next step? Since only a minority of the userbase is posting here and only a fraction of them is here to discuss topics beyond their own survey I only can ask the project team for the direction.

Beside pushing code there might be other ways:
www.limesurvey.org/en/forum/future-featu...sponsor-new-features

And since you brought up the volunteers aspect of the Limesurvey project.
What does this job offer mean "Wanted: Open Source PHP Developer in Hamburg/Germany" to the project?

If some words sound harsh, take my apology in advance. As a non-native speaker I sometimes strike a wrong note.

I stand corrected, as far as I know, all but one developer (who starts next week) are volunteers. I'll see what I can do about getting the roadmap updated.

Would be great! Developing LimeSurvey is all very well, but it would get even better if interested groupd would know where LimeSurvey is heading.

Marketing LimeSurvey is definitely more than developing good software.

We look forward to the (hopefully interactive) roadmap!

tpartner wrote: I stand corrected, as far as I know, all but one developer (who starts next week) are volunteers. I'll see what I can do about getting the roadmap updated.

I spent quite some time on completely rewriting the "Limesurvey Roadmap" wiki page .

Please help us extending this list of Limesurvey 2.05 features and update anything else you can share information about.
Please also help us keeping this more up to date.

Thanks!

Hi Mazi!

Thank you for the new Roadmap. I'll have a look at it.

I agree with Tammo and Jelo, that while this might not seem very important for the developer team, everyone else who is interested in using Limesurvey on a long term needs to get an idea where Limesurvey is heading. Otherwise anyone who might put some resources into Limesurvey will switch to a different solution, because of insecurity. But even if those people never put any further effort into the project, it is still quite good for the development team to sit together and talk about the strategic future and long term goals, I think.

One aspect of 2.06 struck me: Conditions for sub-questions finally supported based on relevance equations

I really hope it does what I think!

holch wrote: I agree with Tammo and Jelo, that while this might not seem very important for the developer team, everyone else who is interested in using Limesurvey on a long term needs to get an idea where Limesurvey is heading. Otherwise anyone who might put some resources into Limesurvey will switch to a different solution, because of insecurity.

That's why I have updated the overview for you. Hopefully others will help extending it and keeping it up to date.

holch wrote: One aspect of 2.06 struck me: Conditions for sub-questions finally supported based on relevance equations
I really hope it does what I think!

Yeah, that's a great new feature people were missing for a long time.

Please test and report bugs, Tammo just volunteered for checking reported bugs and helping us a little so let's keep him busy