Soundings 2 Released - Shock the Monkey

It's very late and I'm very tired, so hopefully I didn't miss anything obvious, but I'm happy to announce the release of Soundings 2.0. Soundings is a ColdFusion Survey application. New features include:

  • Pagination. Now if you have a 75 question survey (yes, people did this with Soundings), you won't have 75 pages to go through. Currently the number of questions per survey is globa, but 2.1 will enable you to change this per survey.
  • Reports can now hide questions. So if your survey has 10 questions, but the first 5 are biographical, you can hide them. I also added PDF as an option for reports.
  • New logo by Alex McKinney and new admin UI by John Ramon. The front end UI is still rather simple because my assumption is still that folks would want the survey in their own UI.
  • User system. Instead of just a password, the system now uses users and passwords. Currently all users have the same rights in the admin. Note to MS Access users: Stop using Access. Seriously. Anyway, if you do use Access, the users table is not in the database. If someone wants to add the table and send me the MDB back, it would be appreciated. Be sure to populate it with the default data.
  • Soundings is a very old application. In 2.1 I may rip out some of my old code just because it is pretty far away from how I code now. Keep that in mind if you look at the code base.

So what's with the "Shock the Monkey"? It is my battle cry. If you are a ColdFusion site and you resort to SurveyMonkey, shame on you. (Ok, maybe not shame, but I'm wagging my finger at you!) If you feel like Soundings ain't quite there yet - let me know.

Ok, thats it for tonight. Tonight's build was brought to you by Thriftshop XL - my new mashup favorite. Now that Soundings 2 is out the door, I'll be starting work on Galleon 2. Sometime in there I'll get BlogCFC 5.9 done, and than when Galleon 2 is done, BlogCFC 6 will truly begin.


Comments (8) Aug 4, 2007 12:07 AM Views: 1767

Comments

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Ray, this s great. I did find some anomalies in the survey.cfc. You have instances of survey_result and then just result. It's an easy fix, but I thought I would let you know.
# Posted By Steve Walker | 8/4/07 9:03 AM
That is intentional. One table is the primary row, ie, user X did the survey on date Y. The other table has N rows for each result in the survey you took.
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 8/4/07 9:08 AM
My fault. I added a prefix of surveys_ and in my haste to get things working I inadvertently ended up with two tables that have the same name. I am be starting over.
# Posted By Steve Walker | 8/4/07 9:29 AM
Thank you Ray for your time and effort. Styling is interesting, but very doable. I have posted my rendition to http://www.swphoto.net/surveyor.
# Posted By Steve Walker | 8/4/07 12:13 PM
@Ray, have installed and had a play around with this, looks good so far! Nice work on the admin design too!
# Posted By Niall | 8/4/07 2:09 PM
Thank John and Alex. All I did was ask for help/design and I got it. :)
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 8/4/07 2:23 PM
I should note that the css for the front end is now css based making it easier to update the look and feel for your UI. The admin section was built with tables with the thought you wouldn't need change it. The admin section can still be changed using the templates Ray built.

I have a 22 inch monitor, Ray has something around there as well ( plus on a Mac ) so I tried to get fonts as readable as i could from screen to screen. They can be adjusted in the admin css sheet.

Just thought I would through that in there for you Ray.
# Posted By John Ramon | 8/4/07 2:25 PM
Thanks for adding that John!
# Posted By Raymond Camden | 8/4/07 2:41 PM
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