[Zope] ANNOUNCE: new ZClasses Survey/Quiz Product alpha

[Jim Washington]

"Release early, release often" -- ESR

I have put up a new release of the ZClasses Survey/Quiz Product this
afternoon.

It is at: http://www.zope.org/Members/jwashin/Survey

It does some new, whizzy stuff.  It has been redefined as a multi-page
survey product, which may at some later time be extended to do quizzes. 
It does not yet do any validation of input, but many features are in
place.

* Page-centric model.  QSurveys hold QPages hold DTML Documents and
Questions.
* Item (question and DTML Document content) ordering within a page is
managed at the QPage level.
* DTML Documents within QPages allow arbitrary content to be
interspersed with the questions.  DTML Documents are particularly useful
on first and last pages.
* Optional branching from a page to other pages based the values of
multiple choice questions allows on-the-fly navigation decisions.
* Uses QSurvey level CSS-based rendering, which looks OK on most
browsers and degrades nicely, too.
* Automatic storage of response information in the ZODB. It's stored by
question-name.
* Multiple-choice questions are configurable as drop-down lists or radio
buttons. Configuring for may_choose_more_than_one creates checkboxes or
multiple-select list boxes.

It is ZClasses, so it is easy to remove if you decide you do not like
it.  It does add four items to the global add list, and I apologize for
that pollution but see no way around it at the moment.  Suggestions and
feature requests are welcome, though I am most likely to work on stuff I
think I need at the moment.  It is still alpha, and there are visible
hooks for unimplemented features.  But it likely should work fine for
you if you need to do a quick-and-dirty survey.

-- 

Jim Washington
Center for Assessment, Evaluation and Educational Programming
Department of Teaching and Learning, Virginia Tech