It didn’t quite take 2 years, at least. But very, very close. The last release of this script was May 25th, 2006 — - so I made it just under the wire. But this is also a bit more than just a script update. In fact, this is a complete overhaul. I’m not certain that there’s actually a single line in the poll script which is the same as the previous version.
This was necessary; because the previous version was, in a word, pretty lousy. It may have acted as a decent jumping off point for some beginning programmers to code their own; but, on the whole, it was not a sophisticated script, and it was nothing like developer-friendly.
This new version, leveraging the power of Google’s Chart API and some clever scripting by Christian Heilmann provides a better end result with fewer potential problems for the user.
I’ve vastly increased the flexibility of the script — - which once could only support a fixed 2 — 5 options in a single question — - to provide support for any number of questions with any number of options, customizable at the question level. I don’t anticipate that anybody will be authoring 100 question polls with this…but they could, in theory.
And, to cap it all off, I’ve added an administrative interface which allows users to perform most of their basic management needs without needing to crawl into the database. Hopefully, it won’t prove to be too buggy.
Are there likely to be bugs in this? Yes! So, if you download this and try it out, please let me know what you notice. I caught quite a few; but I think it’s safe to say that there are a few left in there.
And by “a few,” I mean “actually, there could be a lot of ‘em.”
Check it out or download the package now.
I received an interesting comment from my contact form the other day. I don’t need to respond to it, as the sender left a clearly false email address as their response address, but I do feel that it poses an interesting question for me.
This is the message in its entirety:
Dude how come your example poll have this amazing format, cool graphics, and when I download and installed yours, looks like SHIT?
I mean, thanks for doing this and all that, but come on, you are showing a FALSE example on your web site.
The example poll referred to is this: an example installation of a free MySQL/PHP polling script available on my website. Now, I find it hard to believe that anybody actually thinks of that example as having “this amazing format, cool graphics,” but that’s not really the point: the question is what a “free script” should be expected to include.
This person obviously expected a fully-realized, designed installation. What I provided was nothing but raw HTML and PHP scripting. No “out of the box” styling at all. This is what I generally desire out of a script: if it has a few hooks for CSS and semantic code, that’s great!
I can certainly agree that if you want something you offer to really become a major player in the world of popular downloads, you’ll need to put in a fair amount of work in providing easy template styling, etc. But I hardly think that should be expected for a simple web site add-on.
It leaves me curious: when you download a script, what do you expect of it?
Just a quick announcement that I’ve updated my search script for Boolean matching in MySQL. The latest version is available for download on the PHP/MYSQL Search Engine script page.
The changes to this version include:
- Fixed: various minor bugs
- Fixed: multipage results not available with quoted strings
- Fixed: full-text query problem
- Fixed: some compatibility issues with different PHP/MySQL configurations.
- Added: sortable results
- Added: configurable field label names
- Added: sample results page
- Added: test mode for troubleshooting.
It’s not a massive update; but the script should be easier to use and more reliable.
Filed under Software, Web Development by Joe Dolson