TYPO3 Questionnaire Extension - Powerful and Easy to Use

By: Virgil Huston

Submitting your vote...

Rating: 5.0 of 5. 4 vote(s).
Click the rating bar to rate this item.

The past couple of weeks, I have been consumed with getting the TYPO3 Training Method Effectiveness Survey up and running and now trying to promote it so as to get maximum responses from as wide a range of TYPO3 users at all levels across the world as possible.

By the way, if you haven't taken the survey already, please do, it only takes a few minutes. Click here for the survey.

I used the TYPO3 extension Questionnaire (pbsurvey) to put the survey together and the ease of use and excellent manual allowed me to concentrate on survey design rather than spend a lot of time learning how to use the extension. Patrick Broens has done an excellent job all around with this one. The manual even gives good advice on how to design a survey.

The related extension Questionnaire export (pbsurveyexport) allows you to export the results into a csv file that can be analyzed in statistical packages like SPSS and OpenStat, meaning you can use this extension to do serious statistics. This is not a simple poll type extension.

One of the most impressive things is the wide range of question types supported, from choice to matrix to open-ended to presentation, 16 choices in all. Questions with choices may have one only or multiple answers, responses can be mandatory or not, and presentation types are not really questions, per se, but allow you to format and present information pertaining to the questions in a variety of ways.

As an example, I used the Matrix - One Answer per Row (Option Buttons) question type for my main question. I didn't want people to enter more than one response as the responses will be analyzed numerically and, for my questions, only one answer is possible or the response becomes meaningless. With this question type, you can have as many rows as you want (see below), which could also be looked at as an easy way to ask many similar questions at once. I was also able to set it so each person can only complete the survey once (subject to the usual limitations of identifying repeat users).

The answers for this question type are entered using the Answers Wizard. This comes with prepopulated selections or you can make up your own. In this case, I was looking for a 1 to 5 range of Very Ineffective to Very Effective and selected this prepopulated option. I added the "Don't Know" response because people should not be forced to make a judgment on something they are not familiar with.

Here is what this question looks like on the front end:

To see eaxmples of other question types, please take the training method effectiveness survey! Click here for the survey.

What I have written here only scratches the surface of this excellent and versatile extension.