The Limesurvey plugin system has evolved a lot during the last years. A lot of functionality can now be separated from the core Limesurvey code and made available by coding a proper plugin. That makes your Limesurvey system easier to maintain and future updates should not affect your plugins.

How the Limesurvey plugin feature works

The new Limesurvey plugin feature allows extending your Limesurvey system. There are certain events within Limesurvey and a plugin my hook into any of these events to process its own functions at certain actions.
The available events are extended with every release and if we code a new plugin for our customers we take care that the required events will be added to upcoming Limesurvey release so others benefit from our work as well.

Limesurvey plugin examples

In the past we have created various Limesurvey plugins for example:

Print answers for admins

A plugin that allows a survey admin to show the details of a certain data set like it is shown when using Limesurvey’s Print answers feature which be default can only be called by the survey participant at the end of the survey session.

Advanced Limesurvey statistics using pivot tables

A plugin which loads the response data of any Limesurvey survey into a new statistics dashboard and allows creating pivot tables. Pivot tables did not exist at the Limesurvey statistics so far so we tried using an existing JavaScript library to add the new functionality for our customers.
The new feature allows users to pick certain questions and the dashboard then shows the cross tab details either in a statistics table using the raw data or even using different chart types such as bar charts or heatmap visualize the data.
Some screenshots of the Limesurvey plugin are available on request.

Hide empty answers at Limesurvey’s “Print answers” feature

One disadvantage of the Print answers feature of Limesurvey is that it is always showing the details of all (sub-) questions and items. When using multiple choice questions with lots of items or the Array Texts or Array Numbers Limesurvey question types, there can be lots of empty rows at the Print answers overview and that also makes the results hard to read when being printed.
With our plugin all empty rows are hidden so you only see the real answers the user has inputted. This leads to a dynamic list, for some users there can be lots of data shown at the Print answers overview while for others who have only answered some questions, the list will be more compact.