How to Create and Use Polls with Wordpress

How to create and use polls with WordPress a free how-to report by Aisling D'Art author of Sites that Soar! (the ebook that makes WordPress themes easy) The usual disclaimer This report was created by Aisling D'Art of SitesThatSoar.com The information in this report is as accurate as possible, but the author cannot accept any responsibility for your use of this information. This report's copyright and your distribution options You can share this report with your friends and website visitors, but this material is copyright 2008 by Aisling D'Art. You may not change anything in it, except to add your affiliate links to the Sites that Soar sales page. You can give this report away, but you may not charge money for it. You can post this report on your website, offer it as a bonus, or use it in a giveaway. If you have a question about how you can use this report, ask Aisling at support [at] SitesThatSoar.com Earn money Get 50% commission for telling your friends about Aisling's books! For more information about Aisling's Sites that Soar! affiliate programs and free materials, see http://www.SitesThatSoar.com/affiliates/affiliates.htm ©2008 Aisling D'Art, arts-careers.com Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 2 Let's get started… It's easy to install polls on your WordPress website. Follow these simple steps and you can have a poll online within 15 minutes. Note: I'm writing this as if you are entirely new to the Internet, with lots of screenshots to help you. If this is too basic for you, just skim the instructions or skip ahead to the installation section. First, you'll need WordPress installed at your website. You'll also need a theme. You can use one of the default WordPress themes, a free theme (I recommend Branford Magazine or Mimbo) or a premium theme. Tip: If you haven't installed WordPress or haven't added a theme yet, you may like my book, Sites that Soar! WordPress themes made easy. It is over 70 pages of step-by-step instructions with lots of screenshots, similar to this ebook. DOWNLOAD WP-POLLS You'll need to download the WP-Polls plugin for the polls. You'll find it at WordPress.org's Plugins section: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-polls/ If that link doesn't work, go to WordPress.org > Extend > Plugins and search for "wp-polls." When you reach the page featuring WP-Polls, click to download the file, as shown in the following illustration. Tip: In most of my screenshots, I've added arrows and notes in red, to make the directions even clearer. Your computer screen won't have the arrows or notes. A pop-up window will open, asking you what you want to do with that file, open it or save it. You'll click to save the file to your hard drive. (Save it in a file on your hard drive that you'll remember, or jot a note so that you can find it again easily.) Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 3 The following illustration shows you what you'll probably see, and what to do to save the file. Once you've saved that file to your hard drive, you'll need to open it with any unzip program such as WinZip. Then, save that folder on your hard drive, and remember (or jot yourself a note) where it is. (There are many free programs that unzip files. However, many computers come with WinZip or similar software already installed. If you click on the name of the zipped file, your unzipping software will probably open automatically.) The next illustration shows you what the zipped folder will look like, on your hard drive. Tip: Any file with that kind of icon (folders in a vise) will be a zipped file. Files are zipped to save space and download time. However, to use them, they usually must be unzipped. That's easy. In fact, it's mostly automated with free software. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 4 UPLOAD YOUR WP-POLLS FOLDER TO YOUR WEBSITE After you've saved the unzipped file, you'll upload it to your WordPress plugins file at your website. You'll do that with an FTP program. Tip: There are many good, free FTP programs online. In the following example, I'm using Fire FTP, a free add-on for the Firefox browser. You can download it, free, at http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ If you're using another browser, it probably has an FTP program built in. Use whatever you've used in the past, to upload files to your website. Once you've connected to your WordPress website with your FTP program, upload the wp-polls folder to your wp-content > plugins folder. The following illustration shows how I prepared to upload wp-polls to my artscareers.com website. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 5 Once it's uploaded, your list of online WordPress files should look like the next screenshot. As soon as the wp-polls folder has been uploaded to your plugins folder, it's installed in your WordPress files. All you need to do is activate it. ACTIVATE YOUR POLL PLUGINS To do that, open your WordPress dashboard and – if you're using WordPress 2.5.x or above -- select the Plugins tab at the far right. Your screen will look like the following screenshot. Click where it says "Plugins" and the next screen will look like the following screenshot. In WordPress 2.5.x, WP-Polls and WP-Polls Widget will be listed with all of your other plugins. In WordPress 2.6, they'll be lower on your screen, among your inactive plugins. Note: Both the WP-Polls and the WP-Polls Widget will appear on your plugins list, even though you only uploaded the one wp-polls folder. You'll click on the word "Activate" to activate each of them. That's in the far right column, where the red arrows point in my screenshot. Note: You must activate the polls and the polls widget plugins to be able to put polls on your WordPress website. They work together. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 6 SET UP YOUR OWN POLL QUESTION Next, you'll set up the poll question that you'd like to ask your readers. A sample poll already exists. To see it, look on your WordPress dashboard. You'll see a link that says Polls. Click on that, and then select Manage Polls. When it opens, the Manage Polls panel will look like the following illustration. One sample poll already exists, "How is my site?" The sample poll will give you an idea of how the polls work. To the right of that sample poll, click on the word Edit. Note: This is the same process you'll use if and when you want to tweak any existing poll at your website. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 7 Now, you can edit that poll so that it features the question and answers that you'd like. Then, save it by clicking on "Edit Poll" at the bottom of that screen. (Yes, logically, it should say "Save" … but it doesn't. To save it, click Edit Poll.) Or, you can keep that poll but simply close it so it won't show up on your webpages. To do that, click on the Close Poll button at the bottom of the screen, as shown in the next illustration. Or, you can delete it (click on the word Delete) and create a new poll from scratch. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 8 CREATE A NEW POLL To create an entirely new poll, go to the Polls panel. Select Add Poll as shown in the next screenshot. Now, setting up your new poll is easy. Just fill in the blanks, and save your new poll by clicking on Add Poll at the bottom of that screen. That's all there is to it! Note: You don't need to fill in every available Answer line. As long as you have two or more Answers for your visitors to select between, that's fine. The blank lines won't appear at all. Did you have second thoughts about your question or the answers? To make changes, go to the Manage Polls screen and select Edit for that particular poll. Follow the steps shown on Page 7. Remember, your poll is not visible to your readers yet. For them to see your poll, your Polls widget must be placed in your WordPress sidebar. We'll talk about that, next. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 9 PLACE YOUR POLL ON YOUR WEBSITE PAGES Now, you're ready to place your new poll on your website pages. Go back to your WordPress dashboard and select the Design tab. When that screen opens, click on Widgets, as shown in the following illustration. When the Widgets panel is open, select the polls for your sidebar. Here's how it will look. Once you've clicked on that, the Polls widget will appear as a dark blue bar in the Current Widgets list on the right. The following illustration shows how it will look. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 10 IF YOU DECIDE TO REMOVE THE POLL When I decide to end a poll or remove it so visitors can't see it, there are two ways to do this. (Read the alternative on Page 12 before choosing either option.) Here's what I do: I move the widget from Current Widgets (that right column, shown above) to the Available Widgets column on the left. To do this, click on the Edit link in the Polls bar (on the same Widgets screen as we've just been using). A pop-up window will open, and you can remove the Polls widget from the Current Widgets list. That's shown in the next screenshot. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 11 As the illustration shows, you'll click Remove to remove the poll, and then click Save Changes to save it. Reminder: Unless you click Save Changes after every completed step, the changes won't be saved! After you've removed the poll, you can open your Polls > Manage Polls panel and modify, close or even delete the poll. (See Pages 7 & 8 for my how-to notes.) Tip: Don't delete polls unless you really want them gone. If you decide to delete a poll, be sure to note the results, first. Deleting is permanent! ALTERNATIVES TO REMOVING THE WIDGET You do not need to remove the widget to close the poll. I remove the widget first, only because it seems tidier to me. (Yes, I am a fan of the Monk TV show… but you probably figured that out by now.) But, you can skip that step altogether. You can just close the poll. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 12 Or, you can go into your Polls > Poll Options panel. Scroll down to Current Active Poll. There, you can select "Do NOT display poll (Disable)". THE POLLS OPTIONS PAGE There are many topics, and dozens of options that I haven't discussed in this report. You can learn a lot by trial and error in the Polls > Polls Options panel. For example, you can display multiple polls. That's controlled first in the Polls Option panel, and then modified in the Design > Widgets > Polls controls. (In the current version of the plugin, the Polls Options panel says that it's in the Presentation > Widgets > Polls screen. That's a reference to WordPress 2.3.x and earlier. Starting with WordPress 2.5, "Presentation" was replaced with "Design.") The next screenshot shows just part of the Polls Options panel. Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 13 For more tips about using multiple polls on your pages, see the forum posts at http://forums.lesterchan.net/index.php/topic,12.0.html SUMMARY So, you've now learned where to find the WP-Polls plugin. There are other polls plugins for WordPress. I like this one the best. You may prefer a different one. You've learned how to download it, unzip it, and install it. If the polls plugin doesn't seem to work, delete it from your files and reinstall it. That almost always solves the problem. You've seen how easy it is to activate it and create your own poll. Readers love polls! Use polls regularly for fun and to improve your website. And, you've discovered a few ways to modify your polls to suit your needs. I hope this report has been helpful. To learn more about using WP-Polls, visit the WP-Polls Forum at http://forums.lesterchan.net/index.php?board=15.0 To learn more about installing and using WordPress themes such as Branford Magazine, Mimbo, and others, read Sites that Soar! Copyright ©2008 by Aisling D'Art, www.SitesThatSoar.com. All rights reserved, except as noted on page 2 of this report. Have fun, create websites that soar, and live your dreams! Page 14