After six months, I’ve finally gotten back to some work on Advocacy - my Joomla component for providing non-profits and NGOs with a tool for creating email and letter writing campaigns. I originally worked on this component for the Nevada Wilderness Project during a Patagonia Internship and it was pretty bare boned at that time.

Now it’s feeling pretty polished.

Advocacy was branched from the core contact Joomla component. It allows admins to create categories for campaigns, and then associate an email address and/or a postal address for a lobbying campaign. Admins can add a default portion to the message, and then a ’suggested’ section that users may edit to their liking. The subject line is only a ’suggested’ one and users may always edit it themselves making easy to customize. Please view the screenshots below. (Clicking on a thumbnail will provide you with a larger view.)

The Advocacy Admin GUI -

Sample of Advocacy Frontend -

Features now include:

- HTML or Plain Text Emails
- The ability to include complex HTML in the email, including images and links.
- Add up to 5 different email recipients.
- Choose a custom BCC email address for validation.
- Completely customize the “thank you” page, complete with images and links if so desired.
- A randomly generated image users must read and enter details from before submitting to prevent abuse or spamming.

If you’re interested in having a copy of Advocacy, I’ll gladly give it away to any progressive NGO or organization. It’s meant to be used.

TO DO STILL:
- Create a means for localizing the default messages and labels.
- Test with Joomla 1.5+