EcoTuesday Strategy Session (virtual)

On Tuesday (appropriately) Aaron, Henri, Dan and I met with Oren Jaffe and Nikki Martinez to strategize about the EcoTuesday juggernaut. The one problem with the meeting was that I was a few hundred miles away from the meeting. Thanks to technology were able to video conference. And, because of my amazing mastery of the The Force, I could tell where people in the room were, and in this picture (above), I’m looking right at Aaron, kind of like The Brady Bunch. EcoTuesday is a monthly networking event that currently takes place in San Francisco, but is soon to expand to other cities (and maybe even countries). The format is what makes it unique. Instead of just a happyhour schmoozefest, EcoTuesday provides structure and context for high quality social interactions between people working in the “green” fields. In just 5 months, attendance has soared from 50 people to 210 people and the event has filled up every...

League of Conservation Voters Presidential Ads

The LCV is raising money to run two advertisements for the presidential race. The ads don’t favor any particular candidate, rather aim to raise possibly the most important issue facing American’s today: How will we change our country’s policies to preserve the habitability of our planet for future...

Dropping sidebars from Panels pages with panels 1 module

A few people at the Seattle DUG have asked me how to drop sidebars from panels generated pages. With Panels 2, this is made easy, just a configuration setting. However if you are using the original panels module, you’ll need to add a little snippet of code to your theme’s template.php file: // Hide sidebars on panel pages if (function_exists('panels_is_panels_page') && $vars['panels_page'] = panels_is_panels_page()) { $vars['sidebar_left'] = ''; $vars['sidebar_right'] = ''; $body_classes[] = 'panels_page';...

Robert Douglas on ViewsFastSearch

Robert Douglas of Lullabot wrote a great tutorial on setting up Views Fast Search, a great module that speeds up search on your Drupal site (an oversimplification, but I’ll let you read Robert’s article for the details). The module, by CivicActions team member Doug Green is a valuable addition to the Views Module suite. Even if you are not using Views Fast Search the tutorial does a good job of explaining what views are and shows some good step by step instructions on configuring a...

SignIt: Petions and Activist Mail in Drupal and CiviCRM

One of the missing fruits in the Drupal module cornucopia has been online petitions. It seems with each major release of drupal there has been something “petition like” but never has a module really satisfied a broad range of requirements around petitions. There are many reasons for this, to be sure, competiting CRM solutions (to use CiviCRM or not), various specialized petition requirements, numerous ad-hoc soolutions. Online petitions falling out of favor with the people who typically might use them. At its core, a petition is a very simple thing. Some text that people can sign their name to. Add some whistles: people can add comments, email the petition to other friends, statistics and metrics, reporting, petition delivery, automatic scheduling of closing dates for signature collection, and probably a whole bunch of others. Petitions are similar, in some ways, to “activist mail”, email messages that users can send to targets. The only difference is that a petition does not immediately get sent to a target each time a user signs it. Activist mail is similar to a letter to the editor in that a user customizes or writes a letter from scratch and sends it to one or many publications, usually picked off of a list based on geography. Drupal has had some good modules that deal with the later two functions: Citizen Speak and LTE come to mind specifically. Both were so similar that I encouraged Development Seed (the LTE maintainer) to look at folding in some of the CitizenSpeak functionality. We used the resulting module SeedCampaign to great success on the SaveOceanBeach site which collected hundreds of...