After almost two months since RC2 release the next (and hopefully last) release candidate is now available! Among dozen of bugfixes there have been two areas worked on intensely: The Central Participants database (many issues were fixed here and new features added) and the new RemoteControl2 API (based on JSON-RPC/XML-RPC). Please note that the coding of the RemoteControl API was exclusively sponsored by your donation money! Let us know if you think something is missing. We invite everyone to have a look at LimeSurvey 2.0 and ask you to report any issues back to us as soon as possible. Only that way it can quickly become stable for a full release.

Update: We are at RC7 now because we have been reported two show-stopper bugs. Thank you for the feedback!

Help us to finish LimeSurvey 2.0: Today we start the LimeSurvey 2012 Fund-Raiser, which is our first fund-raising drive ever. We ask you to donate a small part of the money that  LimeSurvey saved you in the first place compared to commercial software/services. Why? The idea behind LimeSurvey is not only only being free and open source but also it should be fun to work with and have an extensive feature set - usable by all kind of users. Be it the student doing a survey for the master thesis or a company using it to survey thousands of participants.

The volunteer work done by our team of 20 volunteer developers/supporters/translators is amazing and they are the reason LimeSurvey has come this far. Still for bigger changes you need full-time developers - that's what we will use your donated money exclusively for. You will help to speed up development and get new/redesigned features much faster (see our donation letter for more information).

Now, think about how much LimeSurvey helped you and you have the chance to give something in return: Please donate!

P.S: If you donate you will receive a donators status in the forums, and, if you want to, you will also be listed on our page of donators. For donations of 500 USD or more you will even be able to link your name with an URL of your choice.

There have been many forum posts recently asking how to use Expression Manager (EM) and other new features available in Version 1.92+. We have found the best way to learn is to explore working demos.

So, we have updated the documentation to provide easy access to 9 new surveys that test all of the EM and new 1.92 features. For each, we describe which features the survey demonstrates, and provide representative screen shots plus a link to download the survey so that you can import and play with it yourself. The main features demonstrated include:

• Relevance - with support for more powerful conditional logic than is available via the 1.91+ Conditions editor.
• Group-level Relevance - if the same conditions apply to all questions in a group, you no longer have to apply them to each question (as was true in 1.91+) - simply specify the relevance at the group-level.
• Cascading Relevance - this never worked perfectly in 1.91+. Now it does. And, you don't need to specify all of the conditional logic for cascaded questions - they will automatically inherit the conditions from any questions upon which they depend.
• Piping / Tailoring - easier, more powerful ability to insert answers and question metadata than the old {INSERTANS:xxx} syntax.
• Conditional Micro-Tailoring - you can dynamically change sentences, such as "Mr." vs. "Mrs.", or "child" vs. "children" based upon prior questions (even ones on the same page). You can even conjugate verbs and decline nouns based upon the gender and/or number of your subjects.
• Equations - there is a new Equation question type that lets you do complex calculations and store them in the database, all without needing custom JavaScript (thus, this is more powerful and flexible than 1.91+ Assessment functionality).
• Conditional Validation - traditional validation, like regular expressions, min/max numbers of answers, min/max individual values, and min/max/equals summed values are more robustly supported, with tailored message and CSS styling rather than pop-up messages. Moreover, you can use equations so that your min/max criteria are based upon prior answers. Additionally, these traditional validation styles work for many more question types.
• (Sub)-Question Level Validation - for most question types, you can now use complex expressions to validate either individual answers or the collection of answers. This lets you do things like ensure that answers are in descending order; specify the maximum responses on a row; or even call external functions to validate the response.
• Better International Support - you can now use the comma as a radix separator (decimal point) in all question types that require numerical input, plus be sure that the data will be properly stored in the database.
• Qcode Naming - when you do tailoring, you need to know the proper naming of your variables. One of the surveys includes samples of every question type so you can see how variables should be named.
• Tailoring using Question Metadata - there are now 16 "dot notation" suffixes available for each question. These let you easily access question metadata (e.g. text, relevance, number, IDs) and answer metadata (e.g. the value stored in the database, the value shown, or the assessment value). One of the surveys has tables showing (for all question types), the values generated for each of these dot notation suffixes.