Development Seed Blog

Development Seed announces the release of our modifications to the Letter to the Editor tool originally created by Downhill Battle Labs. Changes to the module include several functions which make management easier for the admin of the Letter to the Editor. Using the Letter to the Editor tool as an additional module to Drupal, the admin can easily assign talking points to appear along-side the letter form, is given the ability to change text to explain the mission of the campaign, the addition of a graphical and numeric display of the number of letters sent, the addition of counting to which individual papers letters have been sent, and finally the ability to use a slightly modified version of the contact directory module to edit records in the paper database via the website interface.

A lot of work remains. First, the module is not very Drupal or CivicSpace-ish. Development standards are not met – these need to be met to make continued development easier. There are definite design limitations – we designed this version to work on a page within Drupal that does not use any blocks (no sidebars) to take advantage of horizontal space. Additionally, an external php mailer is used where Drupal’s built in capacity to send emails should probably be harnessed. Lastly, the tool only lets you run one campaign. The need to run muliple campaigns with a full feature tool set exists, but it needs to be spec-ed and coded. Anyone interested?

Be sure to read the readme.txt file, it is a little difficult to install. You can download the module here: http://www.ectopico.com/dev/lte/lte.tar.gz. Let us know if you have any questions. Our modifications make some of the features compatible with Drupal/CivicSpace version 4.6.