Opinion Polling and PHP

Question

Okay, so I want to make a polling site but it doesn't work like a typical poll.

Here's how I would like mine to operate:

User registers and is sent confirmation email Once they confirm they can log in From there they get to one giant poll with several topics but apposed to choosing one topic, they would have 20 or so "tokens" where they may distribute them among each topic as desired. These users then save their votes, and it goes into a database where results can then be displayed. These 20 tokens would replenish once a week, or month, or bi-weekly or something.

This is the basic idea. I'm not asking if this is a good idea. I would just like to know if there is a poll plugin/add-on type thing that I can just install on my site that would support this or if this would have to be custom made?

Additional features on this site would be that there would be a different section, where users would vote on a typical poll. This poll would ask what topics should be added to the first main poll.

If a plugin exist that would support this could someone tell me or it.

Or if this were custom made. How intense would it be? I have a novice understanding of PHP and MySQL is this something I could do?

I appreciate the help,

Thanks

Answer 1

Well, generally a plugin requires an architecture to plug in to, such as a CMS system like Wordpress or Joomla. So "plugin" is probably the wrong term to use for what you're looking for. It sounds more like you want a software package or a pre-written script.

What you're describing sounds fairly site-specific however, and I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a pre-existing solution. To make a generic package like that would take some definite effort, because it's going to to depend on the specifics of a site's visual design (CSS-skinning required), it's database (installation and support for multiple databases required), probably a cron job (scheduling reliance required), as well as integration into a user's PHP code. It also sounds like an uncommon polling set-up.

To build it from scratch probably wouldn't take an experienced developer too long. It sounds like something you could throw a simplistic back-end together for in a few days or a week, and then add whatever site design on top of it. If you've never built a site in MySQL and PHP before, you'll probably need a lot longer to account for the learning curve. It's not too steep with PHP/MySQL, but good practices and design take time to learn, so you might have a few setbacks.

Answer 2

Take a look at these tutorials. At the very least they can serve as a great starting point and maybe give you some inspiration.

• http://www.9lessons.info/2009/08/vote-with-jquery-ajax-and-php.html
• http://www.codingmix.com/2010/10/how-to-create-poll-system-using-php.html

I think the biggest change is that you'll need to store the tokens in your database per each user (or IP address) with a date so you know when to reset the token count to 20. You can either reset the count when the user visits the site and the date to replenish has past, or you can have a scheduled task that resets them as needed.