twtpoll Plugin for Mango Blog

For awhile now, I have been wanting to create a Mango Plugin that people could use on their blogs. There are so many great plugins already for the Mango Blog framework, and the possibilities are endless for more.

I have several ideas for various plugins that I plan to develop out as time allows. Some are simple, some are not.

As luck should have it, some time made itself available, and one of my ideas came to fruition. Allow me to explain.

twtpoll (http://twtpoll.com/) is a feedback tool that helps conduct polls/surveys on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media sites. twtpoll allows users to create unlimited polls for free and choose from 17 different types of questions when creating their polls. It also allows them to see any comments people leave after voting, and any tweets sent about the polls.

As a heavy blogger and tweeter, I try to think of ideas to engage users and followers. twtpoll is a very simple, yet powerful tool to engage and gain feedback.

Another handy feature they offer is the ability to embed the polls and graphs into a blog. This way, bloggers can create a poll to coincide with a topic in a post, and gain/display instant feedback to readers. Bloggers can also send a link for the poll around on Twitter or post a link on Facebook to engage an audience across multiple platforms.

The process is also fairly simple. Go to twtpoll.com, enter your Twitter username (ex: @bricecheddarn), and great your poll with a few easy clicks. Once the poll is created, the page will refresh and display your poll.

Take a look at the link after the page refreshes (ex: http://twtpoll.com/nhrpmi ). The link will contain the ID for the poll. That link is all you need to embed a twtpoll into a Mango Blog post with this twtpoll plugin I developed.

twtpoll-v0.9

twtpoll's embed code is fairly simple, and involves just a few snippets of javascript. I took that embed code, and wrapped a plugin around it. Similar to other plugins out there, once activated this plugin allows you to paste a snippet of code into a blog post to display the poll and the poll results (ex: [twtpoll:nhrpmi:250]). The number in the snippet allows you to change up the size (in pixels) of the results pie chart that is displayed. Check it out below!

To install the twtpoll plugin, put a copy of the twtpoll folder into the folder: %mango_root%/components/plugins/user

Then:

- log into the Mango administrator

- go into Plugins

- and activate twtpoll

I plan on continually improving this plugin. For now, it is still basic, but it does the job. Let me know your thoughts. I also licensed it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, so hack away at it if you want.