CampaignFoundations.com

CampaignFoundations.com offers site development work for an hourly consulting fee. But our focus is putting the tools in your hands that permit you to publish your message and content to the web with minimal technical expertise or overhead on your end.

This tutorial is designed to get you started. In fact, we hope to have your basic site up, delivering your message to your community within two hours.

In this tutorial we will create a Mayoral campaign site for Charlie Sierra, who is working hard to extinguish the fire at the Velcro Time Dump. Her site is at:
http://cls.campaignfoundations.com/. You should adapt the links we offer here to use your own domain, the menu items we suggest to reflect how you wish to organize your content.

Link to your website.

When you subscribe to our hosting service, during installation, we will send you a copy of our stock supporters.copy and supporters.conf files for you to customize for your campaign. Or you may download them at: supporters.copy and supporters.conf. Please edit these with a plain text editor and return these files for installation.

The format is critical. If we break the format, this will break your donate, subscribe and volunteer forms.

The donation / subscription / volunteer forms provided by supporters.cgi are backed by a referral engine designed to make the data you collect on your website immediately available in usable forms by the people who need it.

supporters.cgi was written to build the Green Party and its lists in ways that will survive the close of the polls on election day. Campaigns come and go. But our county and state Parties survive to field the next candidate, to prosecute the next campaign. So that your campaign can make the maximum possible long range impact on your Party's ability to do this more effectively next cycle, we provide a means for you to invite your supporters to subscribe to your Party lists while you invite them to subscribe to your own campaign lists.

And everyone of your key campaign staff and volunteers should be helping you do so. Up-to-date content generates return visitors. Return visitors are more likely to contribute, subscribe, volunteer and get more engaged by the campaign.

Neither the canidate, nor the press secretary alone can generate sufficent content to satisfy the needs of return visitors. And besides they have other work to do as well.

As your admin user, and from the left menu, choose administer -> access control. Then select the "roles" tab at the top. Use this form and the Add Role button to create the following roles to which users may later be assigned: Campaign Team, Campaign Volunteers, Candidate, Site Editors. Feel free to create additional or different roles as you feel the need.

Next choose the Permissions tab. Grant your Candidate and Site Editors roles privileges to do everything you might want done on the site. Your admin user, user ID #1, is capable of doing everything, including granting or revoking privileges. Other users are limited by how this page is configured.

Work is what happens when not enough people show up to play. That was never more true than when it comes to a running an electoral campaign.

As your admin user, choose administer -> users from the menu. Then select the "add user" tab. Complete the form, including providing a password and "Notify user of new account" checkbox and submit using the "Create new account" button. Repeat for each key member of your campaign team.

OK. Your ready now. You've created a framework for your new website. Now the task turns to filling it with the content which will convey your campaign's message to the voting public.

Stop the clock. It will take far more time than the two hours promised for you and your campaign team to word-smith the content you wish to offer, making it ready for prime time. A content management system can't expedite the process of writing, editing, refining, circulating for feedback and approving your campaign's messages. But a CMS will make it easy for you to post that message, once its ready for the browsing public. And it will limit what you need to know about html, php, ssi, perl, cgi, sql and the rest of the alphabet soup that describes the technology which makes the Internet possible.