Membership Services: Graphical Counter

Voting Booth
Power to the people

· Setting up administration
· Creating a poll
· Adding the poll to a page

To access the poll administration menus, go to /cgi-bin/polladm within your site. For instance, the administration area for this site is at http://members.emulationworld.com/cgi-bin/polladm.

Setting up the administration:

Before using the voting booth, you will need to configure it for your site. This includes setting the password for the administration menu. Since the password gives full access to the polls, be careful distributing it.

The poll is divided into two sections: the header (where the question is asked) and the body (where possible answers are listed). You may select a default background color, text color, and text size for each. It is wise to select defaults which match your site, since all global polls and most of your own polls will use those settings.

There are two final options to set. The poll width determines (obviously) how wide the poll should be. If this will be in a sidebar, the width should be around 125. If the poll will be on it's own page, 500 would be a better choice. The other option is the color of the results graph.

Creating a poll:

Once you have set up the poll, you may begin creating polls for your site. The password is the admin password you set earlier. The title should be a question or statement users can respond to. Enter options into the text area, one choice per line. HTML may be used in the options to insert graphics or links. Be sure to close any tags you open, though, or the results will be unpredictable.

Generally, you will want the poll to use the default options you set earlier. In some cases, however, you will want to select custom and tweak the options for a specific poll.

After the system creates the poll, it will redirect you to it and it will be entered into the random pool (see next topic). If you want to access this poll specifically, be sure to note the URL you are redirected to, as it will include num=####, which is the poll number.

Adding the poll to a page:

The poll should be inserted into a page using server-side includes. There are three different ways for a poll to be selected and inserted:

or


The default mode is to randomly select one of your site's active polls for each visitor.

This will randomly select one of Emulation World's global polls. We'll try to keep them interesting.

If you know the number of a specific poll you want to insert, replace #### with that number. That poll will be displayed for every visitor.

Membership Services Getting Started Dynamic Content Other Features

Last updated May 5, 1999 by Brian Rahn