The Google Code in 2011 contest is nearly over and once more it was a great success for Limesurvey. Besides lots of awesome work done by our student porting the upcoming 2.0 version to the "Yii" MVC framework some further work was done which we want to present here:

1. One of LimeSurvey’s Google Code-In 2011 projects that didn't include actual programming involved analyzing the statistical data about visits to the www.limesurvey.org website using Google Analytics. LimeSurvey uses Google Analytics to collect a wealth of information about the countries its users are from, their language preferences, their browser preferences, and what pages they view. Full results from the project can be found here.
The data from Google Analytics showed that in the last two years the number of monthly visits to www.limesurvey.org have nearly doubled. In the month of October, the website was visited by people in 185 different countries. Firefox is the most popular browser among users by a large margin. The most common source of visitors is the Google search engine, and the most visited pages other than the main page include the English instructions, demo, and downloads page.

2. One of our students developed a small survey for us to collect more information about the question type usage (fill it out here). The results were analysed by another studend and can be looked at here.

3. To demonstrate the use of certain feature we have created several demo surveys which you can import using the "import" tab when creating a new survey at the Limesurvey admin backend:
- Download Limesurvey Array filter demo survey
- Download Limesurvey Assessments demo survey
- Download Limesurvey Conditions demo survey
- Download Limesurvey Question attributes demo survey
- Download Limesurvey Quotas demo survey

4. To gather some more user feedback, GCi students have created several surveys. Please take some time to fill them out:
- Limesurvey question type usage
- Limesurvey feature usage
- Limesurvey user interface survey

5. Other tasks included translation updates of the most important manual pages to German, French and Spanish or extending existing English documentation.
Feel free to extend the first version of the Limesurvey glossary we created and check out the new "How to create a good survey" tips (please add your thought there!).

We want to thank all students who have helped us, you did a great job!

The LimeSurvey team is pleased to announce the availability of release candidate 1 (RC1) for version 1.92 of LimeSurvey. You can download it here. This version is based on the 1.91+ code base, but completely replaces the survey-taking logic with Expression Manager (EM). Although this is a complete re-write of the survey-taking portion of the code, it has been thoroughly tested and we expect a rapid migration from Release Candidate to true release status.

In addition to being fully backwards compatible with 1.91+ (see the one caveat below), EM provides the following new features, several of which have been on the wish list for some time:

• Use complex equations to decide if a question is visible/relevant or not (a successor to conditions, supporting much more complex logic).
• Use Group-level relevance to show/hide entire groups without needing to set conditions on each question
• Use advanced piping, micro-tailoring, and conditional logic to tailor questions that are visible.
• Generate complex reports (like showing users a table of questions and answers) mid-survey.
• Save any computations or generated reports to the database (via the Equation question type).
• Write expressions using the Question Code as an alternative to using {INSERT:SGQA} syntax.
• Write complex expressions using 70+ mathematical/date/string functions, parentheses, and any math/logic operators.
• Use cascading conditional logic, like cascading array_filter / array_filter_exclude.
• Eliminate the need for most custom JavaScript - computations, scoring and tailoring are done by EM.
• Run surveys with complex conditions and piping in All-in-one mode, even if highly dynamic.
• Run large, complex surveys faster, even if they contain many conditions.
• Use the Question/Group Navigation Index even with complex conditions.
• Jump forward in Navigation Index, re-validating all intervening steps and stopping if any are invalid.
• Auto-convert Conditions to Relevance - so you can still use the Conditions editor if you like it.
• Re-order and/or delete any questions or groups, even if they contain complex conditions.
• Use EM syntax-highlighting to quickly validate and debug your work. All variables are color coded to indicate whether they are set on the current, prior, or later pages (or not at all). Tool-tips show the question code, SGQA, question text, and enumerated answer choices. Clicking on the variable opens a new tab that lets you edit that question (also letting you quickly navigate cascading relevance logic).
• Use the new Survey Logic File view to show all of the key content and logic in the survey. This includes all group, question, sub-question, and answer codes, values (if assessment mode), and text; all defaults; all question attributes; and all relevance and validation logic. This file uses the click-able syntax highlighting and shows which questions have errors (e.g. bad syntax, undeclared variables, or re-used question codes).
• Use most EM-related functions and attributes in your own custom JavaScript, you don't need to re-invent EM functionality

One Caveat. LimeSurvey 1.92 is fully backwards-compatible with 1.91+ except for less-than / greater-than comparisons against empty values. One of the LimeSurvey demo surveys uses a set of conditions that translates to this relevance equation: {(age < 16) or (age == 20) or ... or (age == 80)}. In LimeSurvey 1.91+, (age < 16) is FALSE when there is no answer (the value is blank). However, in LimeSurey 1.92, (age < 16) is TRUE when there is no answer, since both PHP and JavaScript treat blank as 0 in mathematical comparisons. Thus, 1.91+ would hide that question when age was unanswered, but 1.92 would show it. We went to great pains to prevent this, but since we needed to have the Expressions generate identical results in PHP and JavaScript, there was no way to make 1.92 treat "" < 16 as FALSE. Fortunately, there is an easy work-around for this. If you want (age < 16) to be FALSE, then use this expression instead: {(!is_empty(age) and age < 16)}. You can use the new Survey Logic File view to quickly identify and fix any such comparisons in your survey.

The best way to get started is to download and install 1.92, and play with the included survey, /docs/demosurveys/limesurvey2_sample_survey_english.lss, which demonstrates the majority of EM's functionality.

Read more about EM here:

• Main EM Documentation: http://docs.limesurvey.org/Expression+Manager
• HowTos: http://docs.limesurvey.org/Expression+Manager+HowTos
• Information for Developers: http://docs.limesurvey.org/Expression+Manager+for+Developers

Please contact us via the Forum or IRC with any questions/comments.If you find any bugs, please report them on the Bug Tracker.

Also note, for those of you watching the development of 2.0, EM will be included in it too. At present, the version of EM in 1.92 is considerably more robust and feature complete than the version in 2.0a. However, as the Yii port progresses over the next several months, these new EM features will be ported to Yii and the 2.x branch.