Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy. And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs. I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want. These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point. When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here. And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.
The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys. The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.
WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins
The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.
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RodeWorks » Blog Archive » A follow-up on use of WordPress Surveys plugin on Mar 03 10 at 9:08 am[...] wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked [...]
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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