GSoC/GCI Archive
GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2011

LimeSurvey

Web Page: http://docs.limesurvey.org/Project+Ideas+for+GSOC+2011

Mailing List: mailto:limesurvey-developers@lists.sourceforge.net

LimeSurvey is an Open Source GPL Web Based Online Survey tool that has been active and continually growing since March 2003. The LimeSurvey Development Community, like the project in general, has been growing steadily over this time.

LimeSurvey is widely used. It has been downloaded from Sourceforge over 130,000 times in the last year (to March 2011), and is included as a package in the Ubuntu Linux Distribution, as well as being included as a pre-installed application in many standard Web Hosting packages (such as Fantastico). Sourceforge also provide LimeSurvey as a free application for open source projects to use.

LimeSurvey is recognised as a leader in its field. In 2007 LimeSurvey won the 1st prize award at the Les Trophées du Libre contest in the category Corporate Management. In 2008 LimeSurvey was nominated in the category Best Project for the Enterprise in the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2008.

LimeSurvey is a global project. Our developers span the earth from Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The project is translated into over 50 different languages, and is designed to operate multi-lingual surveys. It is borderless in both usage and development.

The high usage rates are evidence of our strong feature comparison to closed source commercial applications. (see http://www.limesurvey.org/en/about-limesurvey/features) LimeSurvey is increasingly becoming a staple product in tertiary education, with hundreds of universities worldwide now using LimeSurvey as a central product for both student and research purposes.

Projects

  • Central participants database (User panel) The idea behind this project is to share the participants between the surveys. As of now, the participants we add are survey specific, however, once this system is ready it will be possible to add participants to the Limesurvey installation/server as a whole and then add participants to the survey. Each participant will be allocated a unique participant_id which will be constant across the surveys.
  • Port the LimeSurvey back-end to CodeIgniter LimeSurvey is currently written in procedural code. When a project like this grows, the code tends to become repetitive and difficult to maintain. My proposal to solve this problem is to port it to CodeIgniter, specifically the back-end.
  • Porting LimeSurvey back-end to CodeIgniter and making few minor changes in UI I wish to convert LimeSurvey's administration procedural code to object oriented one in CodeIgniter which follow MVC architecture. It will be complete 1:1 mapping in first place. Secondly, i will replace normal HTML tables that we use at many screens like List Users with jqGrid. Use of jqGrid will simplify the UI, provide some basic functionality like export, selection etc at screens where we don't have it.And finally, i will integrate the Installer that i have made before.
  • Rebuild the database frontend using CodeIgniter During last year's GSoC, a database frontend was developed using CakePHP. Limesurvey has since decided to switch to the CodeIgniter framework. As such, last years work needs to be ported to CodeIgniter. The final project has to comply with the API developed last year, changes have to be discussed.