Author: Simon
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A Brief Introduction to ActionKit Page Translation
Organizations that are new to ActionKit can run into questions about the various elements involved in translating their forms into multiple languages. The terminology here can be confusing, with words like “page” and “template” being used to mean different things depending on the context, so I thought it might be useful to review the major…
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Recognizing ActionKit Users with sticky-akid.js
The user-recognition system in ActionKit is primarily focused on tokens called AKIDs that are automatically included in the links included by the mailings sent out from the platform. (There is a separate login system based on passwords and session cookies, but it is only used in a limited number of cases, such as changing recurring…
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Extending ActionKit With API-Powered Admin Dashboards
ActionKit provides a rich API that allows organizations to build custom functionality on top of the platform, including rich user interactions, back-end automation, and integrations with third-party services. Unfortunately, there are lots of organizations that don’t have anyone on their staff who is fluent in Python, C++, or Perl that can build and deploy custom…
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Using Template Files in ActionKit Mailings
The templating capabilities of ActionKit mailings are very powerful, and numerous organizations have built sophisticated examples that incorporate various user attributes to customize the message and calls to action. The enhancements made to custom mailing fields and email wrapper templates has made it easier to build flexible models that can be customized and reused over…
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Using Template Files in ActionKit Dashboards
ActionKit dashboard reports are a wonderful mechanism for extended the admin interface with new capabilities and custom logic. Most obviously, dashboard reports can run query reports and format their results in innovative ways. But dashboards can also contain custom JavaScript logic, including functions that call the ActionKit REST API to create or modify records on…
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Building Template Strings for ActionKit’s include_tmpl
The Django templating system that ActionKit leverages to let organizations build customized pages and mailings does provide an admirable amount of flexibility, but as those templates grow larger and more complicated we can ourselves wishing we had equivalents of some of the tools found in other programming languages, such as subroutines. Conveniently, ActionKit provides us…
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Self-Dealing “Scam PACs” Pollute the Advocacy Ecosystem
As the election season continues to pick up, the flood of fundraising appeals has escalated. I understand that this is an inescapable part of our modern political system, but the frenzied tone and overlapping asks from multiple campaigns can be disheartening — it’s unfortunate that this is such a central part of the landscape. And…
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ActionKit Staff Rehired
Recently there was a distressing announcement that layoffs at Bonterra had resulted in deep cuts to the ActionKit staff roster. Given the significant place that ActionKit has in the world of Democratic campaigns and progressive advocacy, this was met with a fair amount of hand-wringing. (For examples, see LinkedIn, C&E, The Intercept, Politico.) Thankfully, news…
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Image Cropping in the ActionKit Admin
In a bygone era, each image posted to an organization’s website might have been carefully produced by a graphics specialist who used high-end software like Photoshop to crop and scale and optimize the image — but in today’s fast-moving world, generalist staff are often asked to manage this process themselves, even if they’re sitting at…