LimeSurvey roadmap

Contents:

Background

Two years ago the development of completely new version of LimeSurvey, namely LimeSurvey 2 (short:LS2) was started. LS2 was developed in chunks during the last two years but until this day it remains far behind the current version of LimeSurvey 1.x. This has several reasons:

• CakePHP as PHP framework proved to be not dynamic enough. To be detailed CakepHP can bent all the way to your liking but the effort you have to put in there does not match the expectations we had from the start
• Except for incidental efforts like Google Summer of Code the development stalled because we had no ling-time contributor in the team
• The current LS1 development team is all focused on LimeSurvey 1 which is used by several thousand users and so the feedback of the community and any support is focused on limeSurvey 1. CakePHP has some learning curve and currently none of the existing LS1 developers is able to put their mind on that with little perspective that this might change in the future.
• Even if we put lots of development resources into LS2 right now it would still take another year until at least basic functionality in all feature areas will be achieved - an even that will only be a small piece of the LS1 feature set.

What now?

Considered the type of past development activities on LimeSurvey 2 and the underlying problems with the non-existent development resources it was agreed in the development team that the future of LimeSurvey will take a new turn. This new way will circumvent most of the problems above by taking a slow and evolving approach.