Development Seed Blog

A letter to the editor feature is essentially an extended petition where you collect names and messages, but instead of just storing them, you also send them off to the email address of whatever paper the user chooses. From a functionality standpoint the only semi-difficult part is handling the email addresses of newspapers, the rest of the functionality exists all over.

We had originally deployed an LTE module for Planned Parenthood, which provided a single site-wide letter, and was heavily based off of the LTE developed by Downhill Battle. But what we really needed was the ability to deploy multiple LTE campaigns for a single site, basically it an LTE-type node.

What we came up with is a really heavily modified version of Citizenspeak, an existing Drupal module by George Holsting.

The Citizenspeak module was used as a starting point because it provides multiple email campaigns for a single site. So all I had to do was strip out the Citizenspeak node's relationship to a user, and add in functionality to let a node handle user selectable recipients, or pull from a newspaper database.

Planed Parenthood, who we are deploying this new module for, uses a Vocus newspaper database It was critical to ensure that this new LTE could leverage all the email addresses in the Vocus databas. At the same time I wanted leave the door open for more focused campaigns which would have a shorter list of recipients, that could be entered by a site administrator, like where we deployed this for votenopowergrab.com/letter.

As you can see we are really trying to focus on flexibility. The module that Citizenspeak eventually became, which we've been calling seedcampaign, creates a new node type that can function like a petition, a LTE, or a database driven LTE.

Usability was also a major focus in our development of this module. We wanted site admins with out coding skills to be able to quickly update or create new letter campaigns or petitions on their own. Having recently started using the tabs module we really wanted to use it in this module to present different sets of information to help in the letter writing process, ie a tab for talking points, on for helpful hints, and one for background information. When viewing a seedcampaign the screen is broken into quadrants, on the top left the list of papers, on the top right is the form users contact information, on the bottom left is a big text area for the letter, and in the bottom right is the tabbed talking points, hints, and background info.

Also, campaigns sometimes need some kind of a ‘Dean Bat’, a visual measure of how close the goal is. So we added that to this module too, admins can set the campaign's goal, the bat's upper and lower limit, and even add some fluff, to bolster the numbers. This was influenced by the echo_bat module built by echoditto. http://opensource.echoditto.com/

Attached is tarball of the module for drupal 4.6 in it's current state. We haven't yet given it the full QA rundown, and there are still a few things I'd like to fix up, including alot of code that is left over from the modules previous life as Citizenspeak. But we wanted to get it back out to everyone as soon as possible. Here it is, enjoy / use at your own risk/ and always backup your database before installing a new module.

I hope after some good feedback from George Holsting and the guys at CivicActions we will have a better idea of how to commit some of this functionality back into drupal.org