collective.megaphone 1.0a1

Run an online advocacy campaign from your Plone site.

Introduction

Megaphone makes it easy to build powerful online advocacy campaigns in Plone.

Features

• Letters to decision makers

• Required and optional recipients

• Save data locally

• Save data to Salesforce.com (requires salesforcepfgadapter)

• Email letters to targets

• Customizable thank-you letter to sender

Limitations

No product is perfect. There are some important things Megaphone doesn’t do (yet), including:

• Matching of users to targets based on postal address

• Delivery to targets who don’t have a publicly-accessible email address

Coming soon

Megaphone is still under development, and there are quite a few features we’ve got in progress, but are not released yet. Highlights include:

• Advocacy petitions with public display of results

You can view our full development tracker.

How it works

Megaphone builds on top of several fantastic Plone products to do its work without reinventing the wheel.

• The heart of Megaphone is PloneFormGen, which provides the core form-handling capabilities.

• Because advocacy letter is a fairly complicated PloneFormGen with lots of defaults, we’ve built collective.z3cform.wizard which lets us make a very user-friendly wizard for building out the advocacy letter. The wizard can be run and then re-run to let a user change the settings. More advanced users can directly edit the PloneFormGen fields and objects to create more complex setups.

• Salesforce integration is via the Salesforce PFG Adapter and the underlying Salesforce Base Connector.

Installation

Megaphone has been tested with Plone 3.2 and 3.3, and should be installed using buildout in order to include the needed dependencies.

Simply add collective.megaphone to the list of eggs for your instance. If using Plone <3.3, you must also load its zcml.

After running buildout and starting your Zope instance, install collective.megaphone via the Add/Remove Products configlet or portal_quickinstaller.

Now you should be able to add an ‘Action Letter’ via the add item menu.

Make sure that you configure your Plone site’s e-mail settings before trying to send a letter.

Salesforce export

In order to create a letter that saves contact information to Salesforce, you must install the Products.salesforcepfgadapter and Products.salesforcebaseconnector eggs.

CAPTCHA support

In order to include CAPTCHA fields, you must also install the collective.captcha or collective.recaptcha egg, and load its ZCML.

If using collective.recaptcha, you must also configure your recaptcha keys via the /@@recaptcha-settings view.

Credits

Megaphone was developed by ONE/Northwest as part of the Civic Engagement Platform funded by Meyer Memorial Trust and Surdna Foundation.

Conceptual work by Jon Stahl, Drew Bernard, et al.

Development by David Glick and Jon Baldivieso.

Changelog

1.0a1 (2009-06-25)

• Initial release.