One of the simplest and most popular add-ons to a Web site is anonline poll, allowing visitors to vote on hot-button issues. In thisarticle, find out how PHP can be used to build a powerful, good-lookingonline poll for your Web site, and also learn a little bit about its imageand cookie manipulation functions.
This is a good time for you to download the source code, so that you can refer to it throughout this tutorial (you will need a Web server capable of running PHP and a mySQL database in order to run the application).
After spending an hour looking out the window and another hour at lunch (hey, these are billable hours!), this is the database structure I came up with.
#
# Table structure for table 'poll'
# poll.sql in the source archive
CREATE TABLE poll (
id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
question varchar(255) NOT NULL,
response1 varchar(255) NOT NULL,
response2 varchar(255) NOT NULL,
response3 varchar(255) NOT NULL,
votes1 int(10) unsigned DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL,
votes2 int(10) unsigned DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL,
votes3 int(10) unsigned DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL,
date date DEFAULT '0000-00-00' NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
#
# Column descriptions:
#
# id - a unique identifier for each poll/question
# question - the poll question
# response1 - possible response #1
# response2 - possible response #2
# response3 - possible response #3
# votes1 - number of votes for response #1
# votes2 - number of votes for response #2
# votes3 - number of votes for response #3
# date - date on which poll was posted
#
Just to get things started, I also INSERTed the first question into the
database, together with three possible responses.
#
# Dumping data for table 'poll'
#
INSERT INTO poll (id, question, response1, response2, response3, votes1,
votes2, votes3, date) VALUES ( '1', 'The Oscar for Best Picture should go
to...', 'Gladiator', 'Erin Brockovich', 'Traffic', '0', '0', '0',
'2001-03-07');
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.
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