PHP and MySQL Poll Based System

As some of you might have noticed on the left side of my blog below the Recent Visitor section there is a new section called Current Poll.

This is a poll/voting system that I created today and it seems to be working pretty good. I have not done the administration part of it so I have to add Poll Topics and their Choices manually via the MySQL Database.  But the functionality of it should be working fine for any visitors that come by and view my blog.

For now I don’t really have an exciting Poll Question but that will change in a little bit, I was just wanting to get the main functionality done and working properly so I can start running daily or weekly polls.

Currently it works on this blog, I hope to be able to code a version that will work with WordPress as a plug-in, but I need to work on the administration section for the polls before I attempt to convert the code into a WordPress plug-in. 

With this poll/voting system you can have as many choices as you want as well as change the width for the section, change the color of the bar and change how many decimals are shown for the percentage. Since it is based on MySQL it uses 3 tables: Questions, Choices and Answers. Users can only vote once based on their IP address so that voting doesn’t become too skewed.

So far this is at Version 0.1a. That’s right it’s an alpha! If there is a greater interest I will look at porting it to WordPress sooner than later and add some more customizable features too.

Why did I decided to create a poll/voting system?

Why not? I wanted something to do and I’ve never done it and it is a bit involved. I had fun doing it and I will continue to have fun doing it as well. It can also be used as a good marketing tool to find out various things like, changing sections on the blog, find out what interest people etc.