[Tutorial Tuesday] How to Install The Polling Plugin Democracy

Yesterday a friend of mine called Sarge asked everyone what polling software we used. I replied him telling him that i used Democracy. Democracy is a great plugin for WordPress. It works with every new version of WordPress.

You can create polls, edit polls, edit various settings. All in all it’s a very good plugin. However there’s a problem with the installation. Last time I installed it, I needed to move a file from the democracy directory to the WordPress plugin directory. So I wanted to make a little text based tutorial.

Note: In future Tutorial Tuesday lesson I’ll use podcasts and/or videos to explain the things I’m talking about, to make it easier to understand.

Firstly you need to install the plugin. You may know this already however, if you don’t just follow step 1. that’ll lead you in the right direction.. Hopefully.

1. First download the plugin.

This is easy. Go to your WordPress dashboard and open the tab called Plugins. Then click on the link to Add New then search for “democracy”. Then click on Install in the upper right corner (it should be the first result).

Then a silly popup will come to your face, then click Install Now, again in the upper right corner.

Then you will be redirected to another page, which (hopefully) will tell you this: Successfully installed the plugin. When you get that, just click Activate plugin. Then it should be active.

2. Setting Up The Plugin

This is the part that is the hardest/you need to be a bit technical. You have to log into your FTP server where WordPress is installed.

Then go to: wp-content, then plugins. Then go to the folder “democracy”. Then move the file “widget_democracy.php” to folder before democracy, the folder “plugins”.

Bit tricky, but should be done easy, as long you know how to use a FTP client. Otherwise write in the comments.

Go to the Installed plugins page and activate the new plugin.

3. Use The Plugin

Now go to the tab Appearance, and clicking the link “Widgets”. Then add the Democracywidget to your sidebar if you want it to appear there.

Of course you can go to the Posts tab and choose Democracy Poll to change settings etc.

Hope this tutorial was good enough, and you got a poll software installed. Good luck!