Rational
The main point of advanced features is to enable highly effective campaigning (best practice). The current range of open source and hosted campaigning tools available are too limiting and often prevent best practice. Meanwhile the largest or richest organisations / campaigns employ programmers to develop specialist abilities into their campaigning tools. The eCampaigning Tool's advanced features are thus intended to put powerful technology into the hands of anyone.
Advanced features in the eCampaigning Tool are made accessible to anyone through the ability to select from a growing list of pre-configured 'action types'. The ability to create new configurations will likely only be used by a relatively small group - but these people will pioneer new approaches that can be defined as new configurations and added as 'action types'.
In this context, advanced features allow a dynamic action process based on the campaigning objectives and priorities. Without these advanced features, the process is 'static' and is limited to more generic messaging and data collection that is less effective than tailored messaging and data collection.
Prerequisites
- Read the 'eCampaigning Tool Overview' and 'Understanding eCampaigning' sections of the Front Page page
- Be familiar with everything in the Basic Set-up guide
- Understanding the basics of Zope and Plone including:
- The Zope Management Interface (ZMI)
- The Plone Management Interface (PMI)
- Zope acquisition (helpful)
- Translation (.po) files (helpful)
- Slots and Portlets (helpful)
- Portal Skins (helpful)
- Page Templates (helpful)
- Python Scripts (helpful)
