Home » Webdesign/Webdevelopment » jBetatesting – a jQuery and PHP tool for betatesters

jBetatesting – a jQuery and PHP tool for betatesters

Eine deutsche Version ist weiter unten verfügbar folgt bald.

No matter if you’re a web designer or a web developer, from time to time you’ve got to test a new design or a new feature. And if you don’t have the money for a usability test or only want to let selected people do the test, you might have had some problems – like I did – someone says ‘Hey Linus, the site with the blue box looks crazy to me.’ and when you ask on which site exactly you hear ‘How should I know – it’s your site?’ and asking about the browser and operating system is even worse ‘I think Windows 7 with… Browser?! … I just clicked the link you gave me.‘ In this case jBetatesting is just perfect for you, it simply offers your testers a button to click and you can track everything down with the manager. And the best is – it’s completely free!

Features

• fully customizable via jQuery UI
• built with jQuery
• the tester’s name is stored in a session cookie
• AJAX-built manager
• translated into English (en-US) and German (de-CH)
• translation used via browser preference
• translation ready
• simple integration
• use of Uniform, Cookie and jQuery Tablesorter
• MySQL-driven storage
• integrated stats
• Supported are all modern browsers — Firefox 2+, Chrome, Opera 9+, Safari 3+, IE 6+ (some of them do not support AJAX or have problems with the button positioning)
• licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Creative Commons License

Installation&Usage

• System requirements: PHP 5 and a MySQL 5 Database

1. Unzip the folder and upload it to a PHP-server
2. Create a MySQL table

   CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `jbetatesting` (
   `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
   `time` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
   `ua` varchar(1000) COLLATE latin1_general_cs NOT NULL,
   `name` varchar(100) COLLATE latin1_general_cs NOT NULL DEFAULT 'User 1',
   `message` tinytext COLLATE latin1_general_cs NOT NULL,
   `page` varchar(1000) COLLATE latin1_general_cs NOT NULL,
   `ok` varchar(5) COLLATE latin1_general_cs NOT NULL DEFAULT 'false',
   `oktime` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
   UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`)
   ) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_cs

3. include the css and javascript

   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/jBetatesting/ui/js/jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/jBetatesting/add/js/jCookie/jcookie-min.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="/jBetatesting/add/js/jBetatesting.min.php"></script>
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="/jBetatesting/ui/css/flick/jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.css" type="text/css"/>
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="/jBetatesting/add/css/jBetatesting.min.css" type="text/css"/>

Changelog

• 1.0 — somewhere in September 2009
  • first release
• 1.1 — 22.05.2010
  • updated libraries
    • using jQuery 1.4.2
    • using jQuery UI 1.8.1
  • improved security
  • fully integrated translation
  • position:fixed for the report-button
  • integrated Uniform
  • store the tester’s name in a cookie
  • and many more small improvements

Bug reports & feature requests

For the moment, please use the comments section for bug reports and feature requests or use the email provided in the source. If there’d be a big resonance, I’ll set up a forum.

Contribution

If you’d like to help with the development of jBetatesting just email me using the address in the source code — I’d be happy to hear from you!

ToDo List

• integrate FancyBox
• make use of jQuery UI CSS Scope
• let you define different projects

Demo

As I don’t like tools without a demo, even if they’re great, I set up one. You can have a look at the report-an-error or the manager. Use admin as username and jBetatesting as password
The demo is deleted every hour

Download

You can download the tool here.

Twitter

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@jBetatesting)

Tags: AJAX, betatester, contribution, download, free, jQuery, jQuery UI, MySQL, PHP, tool, translation