PHP / MySQL based survey system available for free download

Hi. I've just recently made the first public release of a survey system I've been working on. The Unit Command Climate Assessment and Survey System (UCCASS) is a PHP/MySQL based survey maker that you can install on your site. This was originally developed for use in the Army to conduct annual surveys, but it can be used to conduct any type of survey or questionnaire.

The system is built using Smarty, so it is easy to modify the templates to fit into your site or create new skins. It also uses the ADOdb database abstraction layer, so alternate databases should work (although none have been tested, as of yet).

The system allows you to create an unlimited number of surveys, questions, and answers. Surveys and their results can be marked as public or private, where private requires a password. Results are shown as bar graphs and you can customize the images used.

A key feature is the ability to hide or require questions based upon the answers to previous questions. These are called "dependencies" and allow you to incorporate branching and logic into your survey to tailor it to any kind of audience.

Another feature is the ability to filter results of the surveys based upon the answers to any question. For example, if you have questions asking the gender, race, and age of your participants, you can later filter the results to view all of the answers but only for those people who said they were "asian females age 24-30". You can base a filter off of any multiple choice question that's asked in the survey. So, instead of knowing that 20% of your company hates the food in the cafeteria, you can dig into the data and figure out that actually, 90% of the people who said that only eat there once a week on average.

The possibilities are endless. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that installs the system and hearing any feedback you have. There are still some features that need to be added, I'm sure.

More information, free source downloads, a live demo, screenshots and forums can be found at http://www.bigredspark.com/survey.html.

Let me know what you think!

---John Holmes...

Great work! I'm going to download it immediately and check it out - I could definitely use something like that for customer surveys on my site.

And the fact that you used Smarty is the best part - I use it in every project now.

How long did you spend on this? It seems pretty advanced especially with features like "dependencies" and filters...

Thanks! Smarty and ADOdb. Although I haven't tested it with other databases, in theory, it should work once you get the tables set up.

You can check the changelog.txt file. I've been working on this thing on and off for the better part of a year. It's gone through a lot of changes and has come out quite nice, I think.

I was only able to find one other system that implemented a type of dependencies and branching, but it doesn't present any survey results (it exports them and it's left up to you to analyze them in separate software). I've only found one other system that has a type of "filter", too, but it only works on one question at a time whereas this will work with any number of questions.

I just need to add in a user system where you can control who takes the survey (public, one time only with cookies, username password, by email address, by invitation only, etc). Once that's done, I don't think there'll be any competition.

---John Holmes...

Just downloaded and installated, went good except I had to replace every occurence of $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] with $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] since the former doesn't include a port number.. my local machine uses a different port for Apache. Might be something you want to account for.

Thanks, I'll take a look at that. Someone else had an issue with $_SERVER['PATH_TRANSLATED'], too.

---John Holmes...

Cool work Sep

Few things which I found:

Firstly, I had to give write permissions to the whole folder during installation, not just the survey.ini.php file. Once the installation had completed and I got the message telling me to remove the install.php file, I also removed the write permissions. However, I needed to let the index.php file run once before I could remove the write permissions.

Another thing: I named my survey Edwin's Survey. But from then onwards, the script called it Edwin\' Survey - you may need to add a few strip_slashes().

The only other thing I found was that my setup wanted permanent write access to the smarty folder. I couldn't see you saying anything about that in the documentation (sorry if you did and I missed it!), but otherwise there were errors occassionally on some pages.

Apart from that, it worked perfectly. Nice one

Thanks for the comment, Edwin. What's your magic_quote_runtime setting? I couldn't replicate the problem with the escaped quotes when I ran tests. I use a function that determines the magic_quotes_gpc setting and properly stripslashes() the data before running htmlentities($str,ENT_QUOTES) on it.

Also, the only files that the system writes to are survey.ini.php (if you do web installation) and the smarty/templates_c/ directory. Step 8 (web-based) and step 7 (manual) of the installation does say to ensure that directory is writable, also.

---John Holmes...

From the phpinfo() function:



I must have just been reading the manual too quickly. I was too eager to try it out

The escape character should have been removed... Where do you see the \'? Everywhere, in the list of surveys, in the survey properties page? I don't know why you'd still be seeing it.

---John Holmes...

Yep. It's at the top of every page I think, and in the title bar.

I can't replicate it. What do you actually see in your database?

SELECT name FROM surveys;

---John Holmes...