A word about Advance Poll installation / setup.

I posted this message previously in reply to one of the topics posted on this forum and decided to repost it here as its own topic for future readers because I think it will prove quite useful to a lot of people.

Ok, I had the same problems a lot of you are having and I finally got mine up an running. So, I decided to share my experience with you in hopes of helping as many of you as possible. I installed the "textfile" version and here is what I learned:

First of all, you only upload either the db or the textfile copy to your server. It just depends on which one you want to use. db requires that your server have MySQL 3.2x or PostgreSQL AND PHP3 or PHP4 installed. The textfile version only requires PHP3 or PHP4.

Secondly, there is no admin.php file. There is only an index.php file in the admin folder. So, once you have all the files uploaded to your server and chmod them all correctly, then you open your browser and go to the directory where you put your files, for example:

http://www.yourdomain.com/polls/admin/index.php

This will take you to the login screen, where you can log in for the first time with admin//poll as the username and password.

Once you are in, you need to immediately change the username and password to something other than the defaults.

Lastly, there is the issue of the image files not showing up. That is because the programmer put in default paths to the images.
I beleive it was something like:

/~poll/phppoll/image/

...but I don't remember exactly. So, the reason the images are not showing up is because these images are not in that directory. They are in the directory that YOU created on your server. You simply need to correct the paths by going to the general settings tab and filling out the "URL to poll directory" and "URL to image directory" fields. Replace the defaults paths in these two fields with the correct paths (the ones you created on your server).

Oh yes, and I forgot one more thing. Once you embed the syntax into your webpage, you need to save your page with the .php extension. If you save the web page with your embedded poll as a .htm or .html file it will not work. It is as simple as that. The .php extension tells the server, when it examines the file, that it contains php code.

That should do the trick.

I will be happy to try an help anyone who is really stuck. You can email me at MissyM@cfl.rr.com . Be sure to put " Advanced Poll Help " in the subject line or I may simply delete your email and not open it, thinking it is junk mail. Keep in mind I am not an expert, this is just what I was able to figure out on my own with a little research.

If you find this message helpful, please keep it alive by posting a reply. In that way, you can do your part to help future users of Advance Poll.

I just registered with this forum. Just testing my signature.

I've gotten everything to work except the result bars in the results window. The text shifts over as if making room for the bar as it grows, but the bar isn't displayed.

I've gotten everything to work except the result bars in the results window. The text shifts over as if making room for the bar as it grows, but the bar isn't displayed. Any ideas?

Perhaps you have the color of your results bars set as the same color as your background, making it appear as though it is not there when it really is.

If you need to know where to change the colors of the bars, go here:
http://museium.net/images/poll-admin.gif

Geez.....gotta get more sleep. When I got about halfway through your reply it hit me......duhhh! I didn't set any colors! Hehe......oh well.
Thanks a bunch.

Just in case anyone is interested, I created a sample poll page where you can see the code I used to generate that page. To see it just use the link below:

http:museium.net/testpoll.php

Great work Muse. You certainly helped me out with the images issue! Many thanks.

8O

Thank You, Muse. This was really helpful

That was very useful in getting my poll to work.

This post helped me get a heck of alot farther with this poll than I was getting on my own, so I thank you Muse and the others who have replied as well! :)

I'm having some problems though..and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong (aside from perhaps trying to do this instead of sleeping like I should be :) ... One problem I'm having is with the colors for the results bars. I am selecting colors, and making sure they don't match my background, but when I view the results, I just get an outline of the color bar but that's it...

Also, I have the "send comments" section turned off, but I still get a link for it, and it just pops the caution 'errors on page' when I try to click it. I'm trying to edit the templates, but it's filling up with errors when I try to do it. I don't know, probably just me needing sleep... I'm going to cruise for a few more posts then crash, but if there is any help available to me on these issues it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! :)

Hello.

I just got Advanced Poll 2.0.2 I want it so that results for a poll will come up on the same page that the poll was on (just reloaded of course) not in it's own "page" (Just poll results come up after you vote).

I would glady use this piece of software if the above worked, and also, if I didn't have to rename my main page to a .php extension. See, I have a very easy layout. One page is actually made up of four pages: left.shtml (my left navigation bar) table.shtml (the starting of one table and the ending of another) xxx.shtml (xxx being the name of the actual page) and bottom.shtml (the footer of every page). As every page on my website referrs to left.shtml, you can see how annoying it would be for me to change it to left.php.

I tried putting the two pieces of php code in their own .php files, and using ssi to call them. No luck. The poll showed up on the page OK, but it didn't reload the page with the results like I wanted. Also, the cookies aren't working for me. I have cookies enabled my my machine, just to let you know.

Is anybody out there willing to help me? Getting this poll up would help my site out, as we just started about a month or so ago.

Thanks,

~Daniel Fischbach

http://www.gcuniverse.com
http://www.gcuniverse.com/boards

Daniel, you'll want to read through several pages worth of posts on this topic, there are quite a few useful articles. I too just started working with Advanced Poll 2.0.2 - just yesterday in fact. It wasn't too big of a deal for me to rename my .html pages to .php, so I just did that - however there are solutions available for making the php work within a .shtml page - something about htaccess on the server side... like I said, check the other posts here, it's listed a couple of times.

As for the results displaying on the same page ... that will likely depend on which options you chose in your setup of the poll questions. For mine, the results always pop on the same page - it's quite nice. The comments window is a pop-up (if you chose to send a comment) but I've found it nicely removes itself after you send the comment... really nice, in fact. :)

You can take a look at mine at http://atlantis.betterbox.net if you're of the mind. Hope this post helps :)

OK, I found the code:

I tried it in an .htaccess file. It causes my site not to come up. I put the code in an exsisting .htaccess file, that has the following code in it:

(Comments included)

As for the results displaying on the same page ... that will likely depend on which options you chose in your setup of the poll questions.

Where are they? In the Settings, Templates, or the actual settings of the poll?

Thanks again.