Polls

How can The Lunar Resort stay connected with its earthbound clientèle from 239,000 miles away? Make them feel really involved and enthusiastic about the resort by asking them for feedback. You’re not just creating a poll, you’re making connections.

Use Polls to find out what your site visitors are thinking and keep them engaged with your site’s content.

Two applications make and display a poll: the Polls application in the Site Menu and the Polls Display widget you add to a page.

Creating a Poll

From the Site Menu, go to Content → Polls.

1. Click the button and fill out the form.

   

   Figure 1: Besides the Title and the Polls Question, you must enter data for each of the Choices fields when creating a new poll.

   Title: (Required) Enter the name of the poll question.

   Polls Question: (Required) Enter the text of the poll question.

   Expiration Date: Enter the date and time you want the poll to expire.

   Choices: Enter at least two options for the poll question.

   Add Choice: Enter additional answer options for the poll question.

   Permissions: Manage who can view and edit the poll.

2. Click Save to add the poll to the Polls application.

Once a poll is created, the Polls Display portlet publishes it until it expires or is deleted. Set an expiration date for a poll by selecting the day and time in the Add Poll form. The default is set to Never Expire.

When a published poll expires, the poll results are displayed, but users can’t add new entries. To remove an expired poll from a page, remove the Poll Display portlet or configure it to show another poll question. See the section below for more details about the Polls Display portlet.

Permissions are set on individual polls. Use permissions, for example, to allow some privileged users to vote on a certain poll question, while others can only view it.

Creating a poll is fairly straightforward. Next, complete the two-step process and put your poll on a page.

Adding a Poll to a Page

Now that you have created your poll question, you can present it to your users:

1. Go to a page and add a Polls Display widget from Add → Widgets → Content Management.

2. Click Please configure this portlet to make it visible to all users.

3. In the dialog box that appears, select the poll to display.

4. Click Save.

Once the poll question has been placed on the page, perform other tasks using the icons at the bottom of the portlet.

Figure 2: These buttons provide shortcuts to the widget's configuration, as well as to some of the Polls Application's functionality.

Edit Question: Displays a similar dialog box to the one used to create the poll.

Select Poll: Displays the same dialog box as Configuration, allowing you to choose different polls from the drop-down menu.

Add: Allows you to create a new poll.

Viewing Poll Results

All the polls you create appear in the Polls portlet in the Site Menu → Content → Polls. When users vote in the poll, the data is collected here. Click on a poll to see a breakdown of the results.

Figure 3: Selecting a poll in the Polls portlet puts the data at your fingertips.

If you click on one of the listed Charts, the portlet generates an appropriate visualization of the data.

Below this is an item called Charts. This option shows the poll results represented in various graphs. The graphs are Area, Horizontal Bar, Line, Pie, and Vertical Bar.

Figure 4: This is what the vertical bar graph for the Lunar Resort poll results looks like.

There is also a listing of the users who voted in the poll, how they voted, and a time/date stamp of when their votes were cast. Registered users are represented by name. Guest users have a blank User field.