Published by KermMartian on May 20, 2005 at 12:00:00 AM CST | Discuss this article

The old Cemetech website, hosted on Geocities and plagued by ads and non-support for scripting languages such as CGI and PHP, relied on a service at Tripod for polls. I received emails about votes and needed to manually edit the HTML of the polls page in order to add new votes. About two months ago the service was shut down, and members have recently alerted me to the nonworking poll. I decided that instead of searching for a new poll hosting provider I would write my own PHP script, thus eliminating Cemetech's second-to-last external dependency (some screenshots are still linked to ticalc.org for the last external dependency that will be eliminated). I have written the first and most difficult part of the script that detects whether you have voted or not and displays the appropriate vote or results page. It automatically redisplays the vote module when a new poll is posted. I just need to complete the section that displays old polls, and the new system will be complete. To vote and check it out, click the discuss link attached to this article or go here:

http://www.cemetech.net/poll.html

Update: After a brief bit of coding, circular definitions, and code reuse, the old polls are now also visible at the link above. The only thing left to do is make the backend so that I can add polls from the Cemetech Admin Control Panel seamlessly. I am also thinking of making the sidebar at left, a pain to maintain by hand, a fully-integrated PHP script.

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