Community Polls 7 Is Here: A Modern UX, AI Helpers, Modern Email Templates and more

We are pleased to announce that Community Polls 7 is now available for Joomla 5 and 6.

This is the largest update we have shipped to the component since we took it over years ago. The admin has been rebuilt from scratch as a React app, the email layer has been moved to file-based templates with a proper editor, and the poll editor has gained optional AI helpers. The voting, embedding, and public listing pages have all received practical improvements as well.

The rest of this post walks through what changed and what you should know before upgrading.

A New Admin, Built as a React Application

The biggest visible change is the admin. The previous admin was a traditional Joomla MVC interface with separate pages for every action. The new admin is a single-page application that loads once and never refreshes the page as you move around.

What this means in practice:

• The dashboard, polls list, results view, audience view, settings page, and email templates manager all share the same shell. Switching between them is instant.
• Bulk publish, feature, and delete actions work directly from the polls list with keyboard shortcuts.
• Per-poll vote breakdowns include daily activity charts and a one-click CSV export.
• The whole admin supports light mode, dark mode, and follows the operating system preference.

If you have been managing Community Polls on a busy site, the difference in day-to-day speed is obvious within a few minutes.

AI Helpers Inside the Poll Editor

Version 7 adds three optional AI helpers to the poll editor. They are off by default. When you connect the site to the Shondalai AI service, three buttons become available inside the editor:

• Suggest options. You type a poll title and the AI returns a starting set of answer options. Each one can be accepted, edited, or removed before saving.
• Summarise results. The AI reads the live result distribution and returns a few plain sentences that you can paste into a follow-up article, email, or social post.
• Cluster custom answers. When a poll allows free-text answers, the AI groups similar responses so you can see the underlying themes instead of scrolling through every reply.

Each helper runs only when you click it. There is no background processing, no automatic suggestions, and no data sent until you ask. AI access is a single Shondalai subscription that covers every Shondalai component on your site, so connecting once unlocks the helpers everywhere.

If you would rather not use AI, leave the toggle off, and nothing in the editor changes from the rest of the workflow.

File-Based Email Templates With an Editor and Preview

Version 6 stored email templates as database rows. Version 7 stores them as HTML files  media/com_communitypolls/emails/ with a shared base.html wrapper that supplies the header, footer, and brand chrome.

The new email templates manager in the admin lets you:

• Edit the HTML side-by-side with a variables panel that inserts {POLL_TITLE}, {VOTER_NAME}, and the rest at the cursor with one click.
• Preview at desktop and mobile widths against realistic sample data.
• Send a test email to any address to see how it lands in real inboxes.
• Reset any template back to the version that shipped if an edit goes wrong.

Three templates ship by default: a new-poll notification, a new-vote notification, and a moderation request that includes one-click approve and reject links. The links are token-based, so admins do not need to log in to action the moderation queue.

Brand chrome (logo, header title and subtitle, brand colour, body and page colours, footer text) lives in one place — the new Email branding section under Settings. Every template inherits these values, so you change them once and every notification updates.

Single-choice and multiple-choice polls remain unchanged.

Column Counts for Public Listings

The public Polls and Categories pages now have a configurable column count. You set the number of columns at desktop width, between one and six, in Settings → Display. Mobile devices always use a single column, and tablets cap at two columns regardless of the desktop setting, so the layout stays readable on every screen.

Modernised Plugins

Every bundled plugin has been updated to the modern Joomla 5/6 namespace pattern with proper service providers and PSR-4 autoloading:

• Content plugin: the {poll id=...} shortcode now supports mode, layout, and link attributes for finer control over how the embedded poll renders.
• Editor button: the Joomla editor's Poll button opens a searchable picker with status and category filters; you click a poll, and the shortcode is inserted.
• Smart Search: polls are indexed with author, category, poll type, and featured-status taxonomies for cleaner search results.
• Privacy: the GDPR export and removal flow now covers every table the component uses, including abuse reports filed anonymously by email.
• Community Polls events: handles points awards, activity stream entries, badge triggers, and email notifications. It now uses the file-based templates with full brand chrome.

Other Improvements

• The voting service now dispatches before-save and after-save events, so third-party plugins can hook into the vote lifecycle without patching the core.
• The approval service emits an after-approve event that the events plugin uses to send a "your poll is now live" notification.
• The new Categories module surfaces categories with poll counts and a glimpse of the most recent poll per category.
• Settings now include moderation toggles for new polls and new votes, with a custom recipient list for admin notifications.
• The poll editor remembers your scroll position and unsaved changes within a session.

Upgrading From Version 6

The 7.0 update can be installed over a 6.x install through the standard Joomla update process. The installer takes care of the schema changes:

• The legacy #__communitypolls_email_templates table is dropped. Email templates now live as files. If you had customised any templates in version 6, contact support before upgrading and we will help you carry the changes forward into the new file-based format.
• Your existing polls, votes, options, categories, and settings are preserved.
• The new email-branding settings start with safe defaults — your site name in the header and a clean subtitle — so the notifications keep working immediately after the upgrade.
• If you have built custom plugins against the v6 events, they continue to work. The v7 events are additive, not replacements.

We recommend testing the upgrade on a staging copy first, especially if you have heavily customised email templates.

Where to Get It

Community Polls 7 is available now to active subscribers. If your subscription is current, sign in to your account at shondalai.com and download the latest package from the My Downloads area, or update directly through the Joomla update system using the existing update site.

If your subscription has lapsed, you can renew it from the same downloads area to get access to version 7 and future updates.

Documentation and Support

• Documentation: docs.shondalai.com/community-polls
• Changelog: community-polls-changelog
• Support: shondalai.com/contact-us

Thank you to every customer who reported a bug, opened a feature request, or replied to one of our beta-testing emails over the past months. Version 7 is the result of that feedback, and we look forward to hearing what you build with it.