collective.megaphonecicerolookup 1.0.1

Megaphone plugin to look up elected officials based on address, via the Cicero API

Introduction

Azavea’s Cicero API can be used to look up the elected officials for a given address. collective.megaphonecicerolookup integrates this functionality with the Megaphone online advocacy tool, so that recipients of Megaphone letters and petitions can be found via a Cicero lookup based on the address entered by the user.

Note

If Cicero returns an e-mail address for the official, Megaphone can deliver the message directly. However, some officials only publicize web forms for accepting messages. In this case, Megaphone will record the letter but can’t deliver it.

Megaphone will also record but not deliver the letter if it is unable to find an elected official for the given address (if data is unavailable for the given address or if Cicero cannot be reached.)

Installation

collective.megaphonecicerolookup has been tested with Plone 4.

Adding to buildout

collective.megaphonecicerolookup has several dependencies. These should get pulled in automatically if you add the collective.megaphonecicerolookup egg to your buildout. _However_, you need to make sure that you get versions of the dependencies that are compatible with your version of Plone. To do so, you may extend the following known good set of version pins:

[buildout]
extends = http://good-py.appspot.com/release/collective.megaphone/2.1?plone=4.0.1

[instance]
...
eggs =
    ...
    collective.megaphonecicerolookup

Of course, you may need to adjust the specified Plone version, or create a derivative set of version pins if the ones in this set conflict with those recommended for some other add-on.

Activating the add-on

After running buildout and starting your Zope instance, install collective.megaphonecicerolookup via the Add-ons control panel in Plone Site Setup.

Now go to the Configuration registry control panel and configure your Cicero API username and password.

Usage

1. Add a new Megaphone Action. Select the ‘letter’ type and continue through the wizard. (Megaphone petitions do not have specific recipients.)

2. When you reach the Recipients step of the wizard, click the Add Recipient button.

3. If collective.megaphonecicerolookup is correctly installed, you can now choose to add a recipient of the Cicero lookup: address to official type.

4. Configure the lookup by specifying the label that will be shown to the user sending a letter and the type of official you want to look up.

   You may optionally specify a set of states for which lookups will be performed. If you do so and the user chooses a different state, their letter will be recorded but without a specific recipient. If you leave this option blank, lookups will always be attempted.

Changelog

1.0.1 (2011-02-15)

• Fix handling of WebFaults from Cicero. [davisagli]

1.0 (2011-01-11)

• Log a warning instead of raising an exception if the form submission is missing required fields (street, city, state, zip). [davisagli]

1.0b2 (2010-10-18)

• Don’t break Megaphones without a Cicero lookup source if they are missing fields required by the Cicero lookup source. [davisagli]

1.0b1 (2010-10-14)

• Initial release [davisagli]