December 9, 2007

I had intended to do a complete comparison between the two poll plugins on WP-Extend but only one of them worked as intended, WP-Polls, which pretty much makes the comparison a non-starter. This then is just a review of WP-Polls

All the reviews I do are based on a few simple concepts. I believe things should be immediately obvious. If I can’t get a poll, for example, up and running in 5-10 minutes without heading to the website then that to me would be a fail. WP-Polls answered that test very well.

The plugin creates a new top-level menu option that adds everything you need. Not only the options to manage and add polls, but also a usage page that explains how it all works. There really isn’t anything else you need.

Adding a poll is very simple, as you would expect, but the impressive part of this plugin are the customisation options.

In the poll options there is a choice between a flat bar, a gradient bar, and a CSS coloured bar, with a height choice. You can also choose a the order the answers are shown in: random, exact, or alphabetical, and the order the results are shown in:ascending or descending.

It is also possible to amend the poll template. There are around 20 different poll-template tags that can be used to change how poll header, body, footer, results, error messages, disabled poll messages and archive pages appear. Although I didn’t choose to amend any of these the potential is there to do pretty much whatever you want to do.

One thing I particularly liked was the different ways a poll could be added. It has a widget, you can also include it in a post, or as part of a theme file by using the PHP commands. There is also an archive page where all the polls can be displayed.

I previously reviewed Poll Daddy. While Poll Daddy appears slicker than WP-Polls, i.e. the results are presented in a much more graphically rich way, I feel the differences are only superficial. The key different is that one is part of your WordPress install and the other isn’t and that honestly makes all the difference.

  every 2004s, 1s ago, in 0.02s.