The Slider layout for a question is one of the nicer features of LimeSurvey, but as a question type it is often ignored or forgotten because it is really an advanced setting of what seems a completely different question type - the multiple numerical question type.

The slider is a variation of the multiple numerical question type because it stores a numeric result. The sliding feature is really just an overlay to give a visual presentation.

This article is to provide a quick overview of setting up a basic slider, and then some more advanced topics - so you can, for example, change the slider background, colour and size.

There is no inbuilt way to use conditions to randomly hide or show questions, so here's a workaround that will do the trick.

In summary, you create a hidden question that randomly generates a number. You then hide or display later questions based on the randomly generated number.

If you have 4 questions you'd like to randomly cycle through, then the first question would generate a random number between 1 and 4. If you have 3, then 1 and 3, and so on.

Prior to release 1.91 it was not possible to record timestamps for questions within LimeSurvey, so if you have an older installation, this article is for you!

One thing that can be very useful when analysing results from a survey is timing data. How long did users look at this question? Are users pausing for a long time on this page? Knowing this can be very helpful in determining the validity of your data, and in refining surveys to ensure people stay focussed and interested.

LimeSurvey allows you, in general survey setups, to record timings of a survey, and with this you can tell when a person starts a survey, and when they finish. But it doesn't - yet - allow you to record the times spent viewing individual pages.

This is a solution that allows you to record a timestamp when each page loads. The timestamp can then be used to work out how long it took someone to go from one page to the next.

The FCKEditor "What you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) html editor is a fantastic tool and really improves the usability of LimeSurvey when it comes to changing the look and feel of your question text. But there are times when I really want or need to get into the HTML code for the layout.

Actually, these times are extremely common. To edit the source code I find myself having to switch from the small editor, to the full screen editor - because in the full-screen editor there is a "source" button. In fact it happens so often, I wanted a way to go direct to editing the source, and save myself the extra mouse click (not to mention the short, but not insignificant wait while the screen redraws).

Thanks to the prompting of my wife (who is usually responsible for helping me move from the "I wish" stage to the "I've done it" stage), I can now show you how to add this very helpful button to your default editor buttonbar.

Just about every new version of LimeSurvey brings improvements to the templating system, which is great. But that often means having to make changes to your old templates if you are upgrading.

In this article I look at the minimum template modifications required to upgrade a template from version 1.53 to 1.8 or higher. In the gap between these particular versions some significant and important improvements were made to LimeSurvey templating, specifically by seperating the styles and javascript from the core template files into seperate css and js files. (Something that was long overdue).

It's pretty easy to create a simple question in LimeSurvey, you create a new survey, create a group to store your questions in, click on "Create Question", choose the question type, type in the question text, and away you go. But what about if you want your question to be a bit more interesting? How do you insert images into it, or embed music, or videos?

It's not so hard to do this either. In the next few articles on aptigence, I'll be exploring how.

Today we're going to insert a video into our question text.

It's pretty easy to create a simple question in LimeSurvey, you create a new survey, create a group to store your questions in, click on "Create Question", choose the question type, type in the question text, and away you go. But what about if you want your question to be a bit more interesting? How do you insert images into it, or embed music, or videos?

It's not so hard to do this either. In the next few articles on aptigence, I'll be exploring how.

Today let's look at inserting images into your survey questions.

Ever wanted to have a question where you randomly display a video to your participants, so they can answer some subsequent questions about it?

It's possible to do in LimeSurvey - it just takes some extra playing around with javascript and the video formats.

Having recently done this for a client, I thought I'd publish the basic steps online. Firstly, here's how to do it with WMV video files.

Carsten Schmitz, the Project Leader for LimeSurvey has opened LimeSurvey development up for a further leap in usability. Version 1.80 has been under development now for 5 months and is approaching final release stage.

What is the point of 1.80? The ever increasing number of developers of LimeSurvey wanted another chance to increase the functionality of the Series 1 releases of LimeSurvey before version 2 becomes the focus of attention.

Because version 2 is such a radical leap from the version 1 paradigm (it's a completely rewritten engine), it's taking some time to get to first release stage, and it's possible that some features currently in version 1 will be unavailable in initial releases. So version 1 has a new lease on life with new features, serious bug-fixing and general improvements overall.

The second release candidate is now out and a full finished release can be expected in the new year.

Visit the LimeSurvey site for more information.

Jen gives a nice review of LimeSurvey in this article from her jenuinetech website.

Jen's Tech Site

A recent entry on the Limesurvey website provides a method to randomise group order by making a relatively small change to the source code of LimeSurvey.

The code modification allows you to define subgroups of your Survey groups by adding text-code to the end of the group name. LimeSurvey would then recognise those groups as a sub-group, and randomise the order of just those groups. So, for example, if you had 5 groups, and only wanted a random order for 3 of those 5, you could make those 3 randomised.

It's clever coding, and may be useful to LimeSurvey users.

Click on the link below to view the post:

http://www.limesurvey.org/component/option,com_fireboard/Itemid,105/func,view/catid,5/id,15828/lang,en/#15828

It's something that every frequent LimeSurvey user will have come across at one time or another. You have to build a list, or multiple option, or array type question, and the number of answers is really long.

Adding 3 to 4 answers to a question (or even 9 or 10) isn't too bad, but when you've got 20 or more, you'll usually find yourself cursing the awful slowness of having to save, reload the page, and type the next one. Wouldn't it be easier if you could edit it in a spreadsheet or something like that?

Well, you can. Using the export question/import question option you can now access a question using the Free and Open Source Spreadsheet software GNUmeric. And you can edit questions/answers to your hearts content using that software.

This short tutorial explains how.

Ian Fernando writes about using LimeSurvey to track your customers opinions, and determine the different attitudes between paying customers and customers downloading free or sample products.

http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/squeezing-the-juice-out-of-your-audience/

Here's an article I found recently published at www.linuxjournal.com that provides a nice overview of LimeSurvey and it's capabilities.

It's a friendly article and a good one if you're contemplating using the software.