phpWordPress poll control added (August 2005)

The announcement is two sentences long. On 2 August 2005, phpWordPress staff wrote that a poll control had been added to the product. It would be included in the Enterprise and Developer licences, and shipped to all clients who had bought those licences in the previous three months.

phpWordPress was a commercial PHP article manager from Spoonlabs. It was renamed Vivvo in 2006 and has no connection to the WordPress project. The release history shows where the poll control sits among the 2005 releases.

What was the poll control?

The thread does not describe it, so we use the archived documentation. The template list names two poll templates: box_poll.tpl for the poll form and box_poll_answer.tpl for the answers. That means a poll was a box that could appear on the page, styled through the same template system as the rest of the site. The pricing chart later lists a Poll module among general options and plug-in modules.

What was unusual about how it was distributed?

The post gives the licence rule in the same breath as the feature. A new capability went to higher licence tiers, and recent buyers of those tiers got it free. That is a common commercial pattern: new features first reward those who paid most, and a three-month window decides who counts as a recent buyer.

For a publisher, the practical question was whether your licence level covered the features you wanted. In 2005 that was answered by reading a pricing page. Today it is often answered by a plan table, so the same question applies to hosted and open-source CMSs with paid add-ons.

What happened to the poll later?

Two later records mention it. On 1 December 2005, a security notice said attackers could manipulate input passed to the poll, category and ctg parameters in index.php to inject SQL, and a patch was released. That concerns one product’s code path. It does not show that polls are risky in general, but it is a reminder that any feature that accepts reader input needs the same care as a comment form.

On 28 March 2006 the 3.2 changelog records that the Poll plugin was fixed to support the new plug-in manager. So by the 3.2 release, the poll had moved from a built-in control to something managed alongside other plug-ins.

Do publishers still use reader polls?

Yes, as a light way to invite readers to take part and to find out what they care about. Current CMSs usually provide polls through a plugin or an embedded third-party service. The decisions that matter now are mostly not technical:

• Spam and duplicate votes. A poll with no limits can be gamed, so find out how the plugin handles repeat voting.
• Privacy. A third-party poll may load scripts or set cookies, which has consequences for your privacy notice.
• What you do with the result. A poll that never feeds an editorial decision is decoration.

We have not tested specific poll plugins for this page, so we do not rank any. The guides explain how this site evaluates features of this kind. The Product Updates board lists neighbouring announcements, including the earlier module release and the later 3.0 release.