In the last two years, we have home spun 4 or 5 online surveys for our projects. It took a bit of elbow grease in PHP and mySQL to get a decent system, and we were successful in creating a usable form for our survey-ees and a reporting tool.
But this year, the demand was growing for doing more of these, and each iteration of a new type of survey was a big pile of custom changes to our code. It looked like time to buy a package that we could use to deploy web surveys more quickly.
After some research, we purchased phpQuestionnaire from the humbly outfit named Chumpsoft. It pretty much matched our server environment, has a good set of question types, templates, saves data to mySQL as well as exports to other formats, for US$199.
I already created a first survey that will be used by one of our project sites to gather data that will help improve their services, and it took less than an hour, and that was fiddling with templates.
I also just quickly spun a silly survey tonight in about 15 minutes, so if you give it a spin, you can get a flavor for what we can now easily roll out. This one provides a link to the survey results (an option). It also has built in option to restrict repeat access by cookie tracking, by IP tracking, or the most restrictive, requiring an email address so that the system must send a message and get a return click to count a responder. All of those are options too.
So here it is, the Big CogDogBlog Important Survey:
http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/phpq/fillsurvey.php?sid=3
Enjoy. Or not.
