Creating a poll

1. Navigate to “Poll Manager” under “CMS”
2. Click on “Add new poll” in the top right
3. Enter “Poll Question”. This will be the question that you’re asking your customers: ie What is the best open source e-commerce solution?
4. The status of the poll will be “open” by default - if you don’t want it to appear on your store, change this to “closed”
5. Select which store(s) you want the poll to appear in
6. Now click on “Poll Answers” in the left nav
7. Click on “Add new answer” to add possible answers
8. Enter an “Answer”:  ie Magento, of course
9. If you want to ‘influence’ the poll prematurely, you can add votes to the count from “Votes Count” (default is 0)
10. Repeat steps 7 to 9 for each answer you want in this poll

Editing a poll

Once a poll has been created, you can edit it by navigating to “CMS -> Poll Manager” in the Magento admin panel.  Click your poll in the list of polls to view its details.  To close the poll (and make it not appear in the front-end) change “Status” to “Closed” under the Poll Information tab.

If you want to see the votes tallied for each answer, simply click “Poll Answers” and view the numbers under “Vote Count”.

Enabling/Disabling the Polls module

The polls module is enabled by default.  If you want to disable it:

1. Navigate in the Magento admin to “System -> Configuration”.
2. From the left menu, select “Advanced”
3. Find “Mage_Poll” in the list of modules
4. Select “Disable” in the drop-down. 

Magento doesn’t provide such a functionality at the moment.
I hope that community developers will create a few custom polls modules themselves, so let’s just wait for Magento Connect to go live.

Thank you.