What is a poll / survey?
Surveys and polls are very useful ways of gathering information about your website user-base.
A poll is normally one question only. It can either have:
Check Boxes like this:
Radio Buttons like this:
Lists like this:
Or this:
Or (less frequently)...
Input Fields like this:
Or Text Fields like this:
Occasionally other elements are added, but we'll not go into it in too much detail (because it gets boring).
Surveys, similarly use the same constructs as above, but there are normally more than one of them, to give a more "rounded" picture of the truth and allow more room for visitors to expand upon any answers they might give.
In this example:
This simple poll script was written to integrate with a php membership system. This means that using the membership system, the administrator can access the more advanced features like archiving the poll and changing the question presented to the visitor. Polls are very simple due to the minimal checking required for only one field. More complex solutions of this type become known as surveys.
Surveys are just longer versions with a little more checking and bit of clever database stuff behind it, but it's essentially the same, so there's little point showing you that too.
