README

contao-survey

contao-survey lets you create and run online questionnaires in Contao. Build surveys with several pages, combine different question types, guide participants with conditional navigation and evaluate or export their answers. Surveys are managed in the backend and displayed on your website using the Survey content element.

Features

Question types

Type	Available options
Open-ended questions	Single-line or multi-line text, integers, decimal numbers, dates and times. Depending on the subtype, configure placeholders, labels, text length or lower and upper limits.
Multiple-choice questions	One answer, several answers or a Yes/No choice. Arrange choices horizontally or vertically; a dropdown is also available for single answers. Add an optional “Other” answer with a text field.
Matrix questions	Define your own rows and columns with one or several answers per row. Add a neutral column such as “Don't know”, or opposite labels such as “Good” and “Bad”.
Constant-sum questions	Let participants distribute values across several items, for example allocating 100 points. Require an exact total or set a maximum total.

Questions can be mandatory or optional and can include formatted question text and explanatory help. You can show or hide the question title independently of the question text.

Pages and conditional navigation

Organize a questionnaire into pages, each with its own introduction and questions. Reorder or duplicate pages and questions to build the desired sequence.

Define rules for what happens after a page: an answer can lead participants to a specific page, skipping sections that do not apply to them. For example, a “Yes” answer can open a follow-up section, while “No” continues to the next topic. Rules can combine several conditions and have a defined priority. Without a matching rule, the survey continues to the next page in sequence. See Conditional page navigation for supported comparisons and details.

Reusable answer scales

Create your own answer scales, such as “Very satisfied” through “Very dissatisfied”, and organize them in folders. Scales have a language and can be copied into the answer choices of multiple-choice questions in that language. This makes it easier to use consistent choices across a questionnaire. The choices are copied into the question; later changes to a saved scale do not automatically change existing questions.

Participation and access

Choose the access method that fits your survey:

Open anonymous access: participation without a member login or TAN code.
Anonymous access with TAN codes: participation requires a valid code, with one completed submission per TAN. Answers can be associated with that TAN.
Personalized access: participation requires a frontend member login, with one completed submission per member. Answers can be associated with the member. Access can be restricted to selected member groups.

Generate TAN codes in the backend, inspect whether they have been used and export codes for distribution. Select the website page containing the survey to include participation links in the export. A cookie option can remember participants.

Survey settings

For each survey, you can configure:

Basic information: title, author, description and language.
Availability: start and end dates for participation.
Welcome and completion: an introduction, a final message and an optional redirect to a website page after completion.
Navigation and display: show the survey title or an exit link, allow going back to the previous page, or start immediately without the introduction page.
Confirmation e-mails: recipients, sender, reply-to address, subject, message text, an HTML template and attachments. An alternative confirmation message can have its own sending condition and settings.
Presentation: select a survey template in the content element and a page template for individual survey pages.

Results and export

View aggregated results and detailed answers in the backend. Depending on the question type, statistics include answer counts, distributions and numerical summaries. Participant records are available separately from the questionnaire structure.

Export results for further analysis. CSV export is included; Excel XLSX export is available when PhpSpreadsheet is installed. The legacy hschottm/contao-xls-export integration also supports XLS export. The available export format depends on the installed export package.

Surveys can be duplicated for reuse, including their pages, questions and navigation rules. Participant records, submitted answers and TAN codes are not copied into the new survey.

A special thanks goes to Georg Rehfeld for his development of the detailed survey export and the enhancements of the survey tool.

Requirements

PHP 8.3 or newer
Contao 5.7 (^5.7)
A Contao 5.7-compatible version of hschottm/contao-textwizard

Release history

Contao 5.7 support

Added support for Contao 5.7 and PHP 8.3 or newer.
Migrated all supplied frontend, widget, preview and backend templates to Twig while retaining existing survey data and saved template selections.
Updated both survey themes and matrix interactions to work without jQuery or MooTools.
Improved output escaping for answers and ordinary text while preserving rich text formatting.
Changed CSV exports to UTF-8 and improved CSV formatting.
Preserved leading zeroes in numeric-looking text, such as TANs, in XLSX exports.
Updated generated TAN links to use the ?code=… query parameter.
Updated conditional page navigation with ordered rules and support for existing navigation settings.
Preserved navigation rules when duplicating surveys and pages, adjusting references to copied questions and pages.

Updating existing installations

After updating the extension, clear the Contao cache, reinstall the bundle assets and run the Contao database migrations:

vendor/bin/contao-console cache:clear
vendor/bin/contao-console assets:install public
vendor/bin/contao-console contao:migrate

This update does not change the extension's database schema. Run the normal Contao migration process for the application upgrade.

CSV exports now use UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1. Adjust downstream import settings accordingly. PhpSpreadsheet remains optional for XLSX exports.

Custom .html5 template overrides must be converted to Twig. Contao may still prefer a legacy override over the corresponding Twig template; renaming a PHP template to .twig is not sufficient.

Customizing templates

Template base names remain unchanged, for example ce_survey.html.twig, survey_question_matrix.html.twig and be_survey_create_tan.html.twig. Templates are available through the @Contao namespace. Use the survey_content block to customize the survey output:

{% extends '@Contao/ce_survey.html.twig' %}

{% block survey_content %}
    <div class="my-survey">{{ parent() }}</div>
{% endblock %}

Conditional page navigation

Edit a survey page and open Navigation after this page (German: Weiterleitung nach dieser Seite). Each rule contains AND-connected conditions and one destination page. Rules run from top to bottom; the first matching rule wins. Use the up/down buttons to change priority. An Always rule can provide a final default destination; otherwise navigation continues to the next page.

The editor supports single/multiple-choice questions, text answers and numeric answers from the current or preceding pages of the same survey. Missing answers do not match, including “does not equal” and “does not contain answer”. Numeric zero remains a valid numeric answer. Matrix, constant-sum and date/time conditions are not offered for new rules yet.

Existing navigation rules load automatically. Unsupported legacy rules remain visible and can be reordered or removed; unchanged rules are preserved. Changes are saved when the page form is submitted successfully. No database schema migration is needed. Condition records are separate from the page's version history.

Duplicating a survey also duplicates its navigation rules and remaps both question and destination page IDs to the copied survey. Duplicating a single page remaps references to its copied questions and keeps references to other pages/questions in the same survey. Participants, answers and TANs are not copied.

License

This extension is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 or (at your option) any later version (LGPL-3.0-or-later). See LICENSE.

Bundled third-party assets retain their respective licenses and copyright notices.

hschottm / contao-survey

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