A client wants to be able to add some simple polls to his website, so I’ve been researching which are the best poll plugins, from both an ease of set up and use standpoint, as well as being visually appealing. We want something that can primarily be added to posts, but also can easily be displayed in a sidebar if desired.  We don’t need anything extremely fancy, just a nice, simple poll.

I tried WP-Polls first, but it looked pretty complex for a novice user, so I’ve moved on to Democracy. I figured I’d document how it goes for others who might be looking for something similar.

Here is an example of the poll in action (feel free to try it yourself!):

________________________________________

My thoughts:

Installation: The plugin installs easily, no problems, but I did have an issue with a strange case of it inserting a random “n” before a poll.  Google is my friend, though, and I found this post which addressed the issue.  Modifying line 331 of democracy.php to change the single quotes to double quotes in this line did the trick

"n<div></div>"

Styling: The default styling seems nice, and if you know some css, you can customize the styling.  The only css change I made to the example above was to remove the bullets from the list by adding this to my style.css:

.democracy ul {
list-style:none outside none;
}

ISSUE: The bars on the results don’t display the same in IE as in Chrome and Firefox…

I had to add a width to the .democracy to get the bars to show up in IE.  By default it’s max-width:250px, but I changed it to 300 and added a width setting.

For mine,

.democracy {
max-width:300px;
width:300px;
}

Features:  It includes a widget for sidebar use, and is easily inserted into a post with one simple line.  It also (optionally) allows users to add their own poll options.  Can enable IP tracking and cookie tracking to prevent ballot box stuffing (though those options are disabled on this test poll).  The only thing I didn’t see was some sort of option to run the poll for a set number of days, but it does give the option to manually deactivate a poll.  All in all, everything I needed for this simple application.

Poll set up and Maintenance:  Seems simple enough.  A new section is created in the Posts section of your Dashboard, and you manage your polls from there.  Name your poll, add your choices, and you’re good to go.  Insert a particular poll in a post by using:

{democracy:x}

(where x= the ID of your poll)

All in all, I’m quite happy with this as a solution thus far, now that I’ve fixed the IE display issues.  I’ll update as I attempt to integrate it into the client site…

Update:  It looks like the Add your own answer option doesn’t work in IE.  Uh oh.