Surprisingly the amount of WordPress solutions for building quizzes, questionnaires and other survey-type forms is quite limited. There are some basic quiz plugins in the WordPress Plugin Repository and three prominent form plugins are pretty good that could do the job (Cforms II, Gravity Forms and Polldaddy) but they lack an easy to use way to create more complex types of forms.

The alternative is using non-WordPress third party services of which there are many. There are some impressive ones out there such as SurveyMonkey, Urtak and ProProfs. They are simple to use, have various styling options and are easy to sign up for, with reasonable pricing. But there’s too much detracting me:

- I want to keep it lowcost and not be perpetually tied to a cost model.

- I don’t want a third party to hold my data, I’d rather have it completely under my control / housed on our own  hosting servers

- I want to be able to create complex forms and modify them when most services – while flexible – have their limits.

- I need the ability to apply weighted scoring

- I need to customize the types of scoring methods

- I want to have different choices in the way a form is processed ( create a report with processed feedback for example )

- I don’t want to rely on a service that can disappear overnight, change their terms of services on the fly or access my data.

So naturally I’m looking at WordPress and I’ve decided to start development on a powerful form plugin to handle complex surveys that can be used for researchers, psychologists, coaches, talent hunters, assessment processors, lead generators and just about anybody that requires advanced types of surveys.

The benefit of creating it as an Open Source WordPress plugin is that users can run it on their own websites and make their own changes.

Currently, we would love to attract funders, partners or developers to aid the development by contributing financially or with ideas. If you are interested in being involved let me know. As of yet, I haven’t decided whether this will be an inhouse plugin only or if it will be released to the public, commercially or otherwise. If you become involved you will have a say.

A sneakpeek at some of the attractive features that will highlight the plugin:

- Facebook integration: run surveys inside facebook
- Advanced weighted scoring
- Mobile Friendly
- API for creating and processing forms dynamically
- Easy to use interface

Update 0.4d!

Much needed improvements in the way excerpts were handled headline the latest update. I have added the ability to set a character limit for the excerpt to be used for this widget. The great thing about this is that designers can make sure an excerpt fits within the right dimensions, as cutting an excerpt off by words is clumsy. Another benefit is that you can vary the excerpt length as this plugin uses a custom field to store the excerpt (although it can display the regular excerpt field as well).

Another area I concentrated on was getting the plugin to work well with the magnificent Front-End editor. The front-end editor makes it even easier to manage the widgets. Having said that, you can control some of the widget’s display from the edit post/page screen as well.

A helpful addition is that my plugin adds the post or page id into the columns on the ‘manage pages’ and ‘manage posts’ screen. That way it is much easier to quickly identify the id needed for the widget.

What I’m going to concentrate on next is putting up more documentation and example uses.

There was a lot of code added so some small bugs might have crept in, even after testing. Version 0.5 shouldn’t be far of to take care of any issues users are having. If you find any bugs, or have feature suggestions, let me know.

I will be releasing the alpha version of a new splittesting plugin for WordPress very soon! The intent is to make performing splittests as easy as possible. Split test performance will be tracked with google analytics and the use of Google Weboptimizer will not be needed!

In other news, I pushed out an update to the Super Post and Page Widget plugin to fix two bugs. The current version is v0.3. and can be downloaded from the wordpress plugin repository.

Version 0.2 has been released with a range of improvements. I still consider the plugin to be in alpha. I’ll push another update within two weeks, so those using the plugin, please take caution when updating because I won’t guarantee a flawless upgrade. I would love to get some feedback – I think this plugin is a real boon for those creating cms type sites.

Once the new design of this site goes live you will be able to see why this plugin is so good.

update notes:
= 0.2 =
* added automatic themesupport for thumbnail features introduced in wp 2.9
* added automatic page excerpts support
* added functionality to give links a name tag
* improved overall functionality
* option to enable or disable title link
* option to use custom field as the content
* updated 01/31/2010 23:39

Read more about the super page and post widget plugin here