Editor Guide

About the Editor Guide

The Editor Guide is aimed at people who will be setting up and editing 'Campaigning Actions'. You only need the most basic knowledge of Plone. While there is a few references to the technical side of Ploen like Zope, 'templates' and the ZMI, these are used more to flag to a reader with more advanced Plone knowledge what is happening and can be ignored by most editors.

The Editor Guide is a mix of instructions for using the eCampaigning Tool and pointers for how to apply best practice with the eCampaigning Tool. Links to eCampaigning best practice guidance independent of the eCampaigning Tool is available form the Best Practices section.

Getting Started

As an 'editor' of the eCampaigning Tool, your role is to set-up and manage Campaigning Actions online. For this, you need to know:

• What type of action you wish to set-up
• Know what is needed to set up that actions
• Have the various content ready to create each Action Edition(s) you need, at a minimum:
  1. The desired URL of the actions(s)
  2. What fields you want people to fill in (default name, email, country and opt-in permission), if they are required or not and if you wish to capture additional details on the thank you page.
  3. What you want the design of the action page to look like
  4. Target person or organisation: Who is the Action Message directed at? For petitions this is who it will be presented to and for letter writing actions this is who receives the letter sent. If for a letter, you need to decide if it should go directly to the target by email or not. If it is then you also need their email address.
  5. Action Message: The text for the petition statement or default letter text to which people will be signing-up to or sending to targets. You also need to decide if you want it to be editable by supporters or not and what the 'headline' should be.
  6. Thank you page: The contents of the page people see after completing the Action Edition
  7. Thank you email: The email people receive after completing the Action Edition. This includes the subject line, the email message and the name and email address the email is from

You also need to have log-in access to the system these Campaigning Actions will be created in with the ability to create, edit and delete content wherever necessary.

This guide assumes the eCampaigning Tool has already been installed. It also assumes the site design hasn't broken Plone's mechanisms for applying the same design and styles consistently across the site (this shouldn't need to be said but it has already happened).

Planning Considerations

Before you set-up your first Campaigning Actions, you need to consider:

1. Where in the site hierarchy they should exist.
   • If you are the only person managing the actions on the site, it is probably easiest to put them all in one location such in a folder called /act at the root of the site.
   • If you are managing a site where multiple people will be setting up their own actions then you may want to have a central place where Campaigning Actions are stored that can be referenced by each Action Edition set up by others.
2. You also need to decide how the action will be promoted on the site (i.e. tje home page, as part of the standard navigation, in a side-panel (portlet) across the site).
   • If you will only ever have one 'Campaigning Action' live at a time, then it is probably best to link directly to the action form and have additional information linked from there.
   • If you will be running many 'Campaigning Actions' in parallel, you'll also want to develop a page to list all the current 'Campaigning Actions'. But you should still link directly to the most important 'Campaigning Action' from key pages such as the home page and emails and then promote other actions in the 'Thank You Page' and 'Thank You Email'.

Furthermore, you may wish to decide on a convention to keep the action URLs? short so that they are useful for promoting and have minimal chance of breaking in text emails.