One thing I could never get to work the way I wanted in WordPress for a long time was a good plugin for polls and surveys. Had to give up on the available set and writing the code out myself–which was not pretty. Then PollDaddy showed up to save the day.

If you ever tried to do either of these things and are not a coder, you may have run into the same roadblocks. The folks at Automattic have swooped in to make this easier for us all. Automattic has just acquired PollDaddy, facilitating an easier to integrate (if not already included) system of polling/surveying.

Some will question the acquisition of a company that provides surveys into the blogging platform when it can be easily added by plugins. Many users of different systems currently recognize PollDaddy as the go-to entity for this purpose, and with this acquistion may be swayed to the WordPress platform. Also anyone newer to the circle will soon be able to implement a simple solution for their survey/polling needs.

Especially at a time when many less technically savvy users are starting their own blogs and want to use services that aren’t as well integrating in the blogging platforms, this acquistion is a great idea.

While many fully support acquisition of companies such as Intense Debate earlier in the year and Gravatar before it, there are many detractors who believe that WordPress should be kept pure and simple. What we all have to agree on is that there are many more bloggers out there who have great ideas but have no idea what PHP is, and that expanding the WordPress platform to these users is not always detrimental to the group.

We should wish Automattic luck with their recent acquisitions and hope it turns out to be a better experience for everyone involved.