Ok, so finally mod_survey 3.2.0-pre1 has made it through the door. I have 
not yet announced it on the home page nor on freshmeat, but expect to do 
so during the evening. The tarball is available on:

http://gathering.itm.mh.se/modsurvey/download/test/modsurvey-3.2.0-pre1.tar.gz

If you feel you have no interest in installing alpha software (  ), I 
have set up a parallel installation on gathering. Thus, in theory, you 
should be able to see examples of all the new cool stuff on:

http://gathering.itm.mh.se:8080/mod_survey/

I'm pretty sure this works, but I have no way of testing whether the 
university firewall lets accesses to 8080 through (my home computer is on 
the university lan too). If it doesn't work, then tell me and I'll try to 
set up a proxy instead. 

For people who have not followed the discussion on the development, here 
are the release notes:

+++++++++++++++
+RELEASE NOTES+
+++++++++++++++

These are the release notes for mod_survey 3.2.0-pre1.

User-visible changes
--------------------
These are the major (user-visible) changes since 3.0.15-pre5 (which was
the point of branch):

* Conditional branching. It is now possible to write survey chains
  that route the respondent to different questions depending on 
  previous answers. The routing types include:

  - CASE/SWITCH (0: go here, 1: go there, 2: go somewhere else)
  - IF/THEN/ELSE (if younger than 20 then here, else there)
  - Unconditional route (always go there)

* Dynamic content. This includes text that changes depending on previous
  answers. The types of dynamic content included so far are:

  - Variable value: Replace token with the value of a previously submitted
    variable (such as the name of the respondent). 
  - Value caption: Replace token with the caption corresponding to the
    value of a previously submitted variable
  - Selection: If value if this, print this otherwise print that (for
    example printing "mr" or "mrs" depending on gender)

* Much improved support for including HTML code and images in all visible
  output, such as CAPTIONs, via a specific escape scheme. This includes:

  - boldfacing, underlining, italicizing.
  - font coloring parts of text
  - including images
  - Any possible html tag

* Drastic rewiring of data exports functionality

  - New interface for exports ( ?action=data )
  - Visual design of exports interface much more pleasing
  - Comments and information possible to see specifically
    for each export
  - Possible for the user to modify the export's behaviour
    (to, for example, include coloring and boldfacing in
    html exports).

* Linking. It is now possible to include external files into the survey.
  This can, for example, be used to include commonly used questions, or
  large blocks of HTML code.

* Perl scripting. It is now possible to include perl snippets in the
  survey. These are parsed either during parse time (so one can 
  generate questions) or during display time (so one can generate
  output). 

* Syntax changes. The survey markup language has changed to be more 
  logical and consistent. Some examples of this are:

  - MULTICHOICE has disappeared. Instead CHOICE has got the parameter
    MULTI="yes"
  - MATRIX has been rewritten more or less from scratch. It now has
    MATRIXROW and MATRIXCOLUMN as subtags, and it supports organizing
    the columns as questions instead of the rows. 
  - The SEQUENCEFILE parameter has been removed in favor of a new
    SEQUENCE tag. (This removes the need for an external file listing
    the contents of a survey chain).

* Many new examples showing off new features. 

Behind the scenes changes
-------------------------
Apart from the user-visible changes, there are also changes behind the 
scenes, which makes mod_survey much easier to maintain and extend:

* Drastic internal rewiring of parser, display system and 
  submit system

  - All questions reside in their own module file
  - All questions take care of their own parsing, display
    and submit
  - Data is transferred between parts in a multipage chain
    via a new server-side Session module rather than as
    GET strings
  - Everything transmitted between methods are now in the
    form of arrays rather than semi-colon delimited strings
  - Completely removed all code concerning cache (both parser
    and display). It was deprecated by other optimizations.

* Drastic rewiring of data exports functionality

  - There is a logical and easy-to-understand new API for
    writing exports
  - Each export now reside in its own module

Installation
------------
The installer has been updated to work with this version of mod_survey, 
but chances are some things might not be installed correctly. 

To install, unpack the tarball, cd into the mod_survey directory, and run 

  perl installer.pl

(Don't enable/install presentations or the SurveyCreator. These have not 
been updated to work with the new code yet)

State, functionality, known problems
------------------------------------
This version of mod_survey is ALPHA CODE, meaning it is not even 
approaching being a release candidate for a stable release. 

It is known that the dynamic content (including html escaping and perl 
snippets) is buggy and may cause infinite loops. The MATRIX code is still 
buggy and may decide to submit values in an erronous manner. The same goes 
for MULTI in CHOICE, and float values in TEXT. 

I will not even mention the state of the documentation (it hasn't been 
touched since the branch from 3.0.15-pre5). 

This said, most things will probably at least start and look like it 
works. If you are daring, you could probably conduct a survey with this 
code, but please be aware THAT YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Bug reports and feedback
------------------------
Bug reports, questions and feedback shouls be sent to the mailing list. 
See mod_survey's homepage: http://gathering.itm.mh.se/modsurvey/

  // Joel

Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> mh.se>
till survey-discussion