Extend Community Polls with plugin events

Community Polls fires a set of plugin events around poll and vote lifecycle moments. You can write your own Joomla plugin that subscribes to those events and runs whatever logic your project needs — sending a Slack message when a moderation queue lights up, awarding loyalty points for voting, syncing votes to an analytics service, and so on.

This page lists the events available in version 7, the data each event carries, and the shape of a minimal plugin that subscribes to them. It assumes you have built a Joomla 5 / 6 plugin before. If not, the official Joomla docs cover the plugin scaffolding here:

Creating a plugin for Joomla

Plugin group

Community Polls events live in the communitypolls plugin group. Your plugin's manifest needs group="communitypolls":

<extension type="plugin" group="communitypolls" method="upgrade">
    <name>plg_communitypolls_myhook</name>
    ...
</extension>

Custom plugin groups are not auto-loaded by Joomla. The component takes care of importing the group before it dispatches an event, so your plugin will be picked up as soon as it is installed and enabled — there is no extra wiring on your side.

Events

Event	When it fires	Arguments
onPollBeforeSave	Just before a poll is saved (insert or update).	data (array, by reference), isNew (bool)
onPollAfterSave	After a poll has been saved.	poll (object), isNew (bool)
onPollAfterDelete	After a poll has been deleted.	poll (object — snapshot taken before the delete)
onPollChangeState	After a poll's published state changes.	pks (array of int IDs), value (int new state)
onPollAfterApprove	After a moderated poll is approved through the secret-token link.	poll (object)
onVoteBeforeSave	Before a vote is recorded.	pollId (int), optionIds (array), userId (int or null), ipAddress (string or null)
onVoteAfterSave	After a vote has been recorded. Fires once per cast, even when the voter selected several options.	vote (object), poll (object)
onVoteAfterDelete	After a vote has been deleted.	vote (object), poll (object)

The poll argument is a snapshot of the row from #__communitypolls_polls: id, title, alias, description, created_by, published, featured, catid, votes, voters, language, and the rest of the columns on that table.

The vote argument is the row from #__communitypolls_votes: id, poll_id, voter_id, voted_on, option_id, column_id, custom_answer, ip_address.

A minimal example

This plugin logs every new poll to Joomla's error.php log so you have a paper trail of who created what and when.

File layout

plugins/communitypolls/myhook/
├── myhook.xml
├── services/
│   └── provider.php
└── src/
    └── Extension/
        └── MyHook.php

myhook.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<extension type="plugin" group="communitypolls" method="upgrade">
    <name>plg_communitypolls_myhook</name>
    <author>Your Name</author>
    <creationDate>2026-05-10</creationDate>
    <copyright>Copyright (C) 2026 Your Company</copyright>
    <license>GNU General Public License version 2 or later</license>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
    <description>Logs Community Polls events for auditing.</description>

    <namespace path="src">YourVendor\Plugin\CommunityPolls\MyHook</namespace>

    <files>
        <folder plugin="myhook">services</folder>
        <folder>src</folder>
    </files>
</extension>

The plugin="myhook" attribute on the services folder must match the install element name (the part after plg_communitypolls_).

services/provider.php

<?php

defined('_JEXEC') or die;

use Joomla\CMS\Extension\PluginInterface;
use Joomla\CMS\Factory;
use Joomla\CMS\Plugin\PluginHelper;
use Joomla\DI\Container;
use Joomla\DI\ServiceProviderInterface;
use Joomla\Event\DispatcherInterface;
use YourVendor\Plugin\CommunityPolls\MyHook\Extension\MyHook;

return new class () implements ServiceProviderInterface {
    public function register(Container $container): void
    {
        $container->set(
            PluginInterface::class,
            function (Container $container) {
                $plugin = new MyHook(
                    $container->get(DispatcherInterface::class),
                    (array) PluginHelper::getPlugin('communitypolls', 'myhook')
                );
                $plugin->setApplication(Factory::getApplication());

                return $plugin;
            }
        );
    }
};

src/Extension/MyHook.php

<?php

namespace YourVendor\Plugin\CommunityPolls\MyHook\Extension;

use Joomla\CMS\Log\Log;
use Joomla\CMS\Plugin\CMSPlugin;
use Joomla\Event\Event;
use Joomla\Event\SubscriberInterface;

\defined('_JEXEC') or die;

final class MyHook extends CMSPlugin implements SubscriberInterface
{
    public static function getSubscribedEvents(): array
    {
        return [
            'onPollAfterSave'    => 'onPollAfterSave',
            'onPollAfterDelete'  => 'onPollAfterDelete',
            'onVoteAfterSave'    => 'onVoteAfterSave',
        ];
    }

    public function onPollAfterSave(Event $event): void
    {
        $poll  = $event->getArgument('poll');
        $isNew = $event->getArgument('isNew', false);

        if (!$poll || !$isNew) {
            return;
        }

        Log::add(
            sprintf('New poll %d created by user %d: %s', $poll->id, $poll->created_by, $poll->title),
            Log::INFO,
            'com_communitypolls'
        );
    }

    public function onPollAfterDelete(Event $event): void
    {
        $poll = $event->getArgument('poll');
        if (!$poll) {
            return;
        }

        Log::add(
            sprintf('Poll %d deleted: %s', $poll->id, $poll->title),
            Log::INFO,
            'com_communitypolls'
        );
    }

    public function onVoteAfterSave(Event $event): void
    {
        $vote = $event->getArgument('vote');
        $poll = $event->getArgument('poll');

        if (!$vote || !$poll) {
            return;
        }

        Log::add(
            sprintf('Vote %d cast on poll %d by user %d', $vote->id, $poll->id, (int) ($vote->voter_id ?? 0)),
            Log::INFO,
            'com_communitypolls'
        );
    }
}

Install the plugin like any other Joomla plugin (zip the folder, install through the extension manager, enable it in Plugin Manager). Trigger an action in Community Polls and the matching log line will appear in administrator/logs/error.php (or wherever your Joomla log handler is pointing).

Pre-save hooks

onPollBeforeSave and onVoteBeforeSave fire before the database write. They are useful for:

• Validation — throw an exception inside the handler to abort the save. The component will let the exception propagate to the controller.
• Last-mile data tweaks on saves — onPollBeforeSave receives the data array by reference. Mutate it in place (for example, to enforce a category default) and the modified values are what get written to the database.

What the bundled events plugin does

The plg_communitypolls_polls plugin that ships with the component is itself a subscriber to the same events. It uses them to:

• Award and deduct points through the Shondalai Core integration
• Push activity-stream entries
• Send notification emails (new poll, new vote, moderate poll)
• Trigger badge evaluations

You can read its source under plugins/plg_communitypolls_polls/ for a fully worked example of every event in use. If you want to disable any of its features rather than write your own plugin, the relevant toggles are in Plugin Manager → Plugins → Community Polls - Polls.

Migrating from version 6 events

If you wrote a plugin against the v6 event names, here is the rename map. The handler signatures have changed too — version 7 uses Joomla's modern named-argument Event objects rather than positional arguments.

v6 event	v7 event
onBeforeSavePoll($poll, $params)	onPollBeforeSave (Event with data, isNew)
onAfterSavePoll($poll, $params)	onPollAfterSave (Event with poll, isNew)
onBeforeDeletePoll	onPollAfterDelete (fires after the delete; snapshot taken before)
onAfterVote($poll)	onVoteAfterSave (Event with vote, poll)

A v6 plugin will not fire on v7 unmodified — the event names and dispatcher signature both changed. The example above is the template to migrate against.