Plugin: Using Poll Position


Poll Position easily makes polls and surveys a part of your site by bringing them into your Movable Type installation—and with that in mind, if you’re familiar with MT, you’ll quickly understand how to create and edit polls and surveys for your site.

Create a New Poll

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Simply go to the Create menu and choose Poll. The resulting screen and its options should be pretty clear, but descriptions follow with a little more information:

Name your poll with a Poll Title. If you’re using Poll Position: Champion, you can use the PollTitle tag to publish this value. If you’re using Poll Position (the free version), this value is for your reference only, and is not published.

Enter your poll question in the Question field. Use any HTML here to format your question as necessary.

You’ll need to provide some response choices for your poll. Enter an option in the New choice field; click Add another choice to add more. Use the Add another choice link to add as many response choices as your poll needs—there’s no limit! These values will be used for labels on the radio buttons of your poll’s form.

In the sidebar you’ll see the Status dropdown with the options “voting open,” “voting closed,” and “unpublished.” Explanation:

  • voting open: normal status for a poll, allows visitors to vote and see results.
  • voting closed: voting is closed to visitors, however results may still be viewed by them.
  • unpublished: just as with a Page or Entry in Movable Type, unpublished status means the poll does not appear on the published site—which obviously also means that voting is not open and results can not be seen.

Lastly, save your poll. If you’ve set an Index Template to with the name “Poll Position,” that template will be rebuilt upon saving—which means updating the poll displayed on your site with Poll Position is as easy as updating an Entry!

Edit an Existing Poll

Editing an existing poll is done using the now-familiar interface, with a few additional options. The most obvious is probably the Votes field to the right of each Choice field. This field returns the number of votes each choice has received, and gives you the opportunity to “stuff” the ballot box or update the count if you want to skew the poll results.

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A few changes will also appear in the sidebar: if your poll has received any votes, in the Useful Links section you’ll find a View Results link. This opens a dialog window for you to view the Google Charts bar chart that has been created.

An About this Poll section reports the creation date and author, the most recent edit date and author, and displays the poll ID.

Lastly a tally of Votes is reported.

Manage Polls

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From the Manage menu select the Polls option. The Manage Polls screen lists all of the polls in the current blog, and allows you to delete or edit them.