WordPress survey plugins

I wanted a wordpress plug in that would help me run a competition.
After a bit of going round in circles I decided what I really needed was a wordpress survey plugin. My ideal plugin would have a range of question types:

• A rating scale
• Free text answers

I found some great articles across the web reviewing WP survey plugins. Unfortunately they were al quite old and the plugins that were recommended stopped being updated round the wordpress 2.5 time and many were no longer available for download. Survey Fly for example sounded great.

It looked like my best bet was WP Survey or Survey.

I tried them both out and both were a resounding fail. One of them did not have the option for users to enter their own text. They would have been great if I wanted to run a survey with multiple choice answers but really neither appeared to offer anything more than this. If I had more than a smattering of PHP skills then I may have considered hacking one of the survey plugins to do what I wanted.

I had a compulsory cuppa while I considered my options.

I had a look at surveygizmo, which looks great and would have certainly done the job. However, it’s not a free service so despite its wonderfully shinyness I decided that I’d have to move on. It would be great if I wasn’t looking for something for nothing.

Time for more tea and another rethink.

What I had really wanted was a plugin that kept all the responses in wordpress so I could access and download them or stored them all in a nice mysql database for me. I did not really want each response to be e-mailed to me. I’m hoping to get quite a few entries and that just seems like a nightmare to go through all the responses.

WordPress Contact forms

The second cuppa though had brought me to the conclusion that a simple contact plugin would do the job as it would give me more control over way the questions are displayed on the page (so I can at least try and make it look pretty). Most contact form plugins also offer a wide range of question types. After a bit of research I decided that contact form 7 would do the job fine.
It was easy to work out how to create the contact page and to get the questions on there.
When I tested it I was baffled that although I was getting the e-mail it didn’t contain any of the data. I would like to point out that it was getting late at this point and though my sleepy eyes I’d failed to notice that the e-mail part was really quite fancy and you could choose what info was displayed in the e-mail and exactly how it was displayed.
So the contact form 7 plugin is the solution I’ve gone for. Not ideal for the purpose but the closest fit that I could find without parting with a lot of money.
The competition is now up and running so I’ll soon see how good my solution was.

Have a look at ratemyspoons.com to see how the finished competition entry form looks. It’s not a work of art but it seems to be functional enough.