As you will gather if you've read some of my earlier posts, I'm hard at work at an enhanced version of Advokit that I'm calling version "1x" (i.e. something after version 1.0). You'll also know that you can grab a tarball of this development version from our code repository.

Now you can test drive it without all the fuss of setting up your own site! I've created a 1x sandbox site at http://advokit.net/sandbox. Login as username: chief; password: advokit

I've been very busy the past several weeks going down our long wish list of improvements and adding them to the "1x" branch of Advokit. The main difference between this work and the improvements I made for the version 1.0 release is that now I am now letting myself muck around with the underlying data model of Advokit: adding new tables and adding new fields to existing tables. For example, I added an "interests" table for keeping track of activist interests so that when we want to fill a job, we can search for activists who, for example, have indicated that they are interested in tabling.

I have fairly extensively revised and updated a user's guide originally created by Dan Robinson for voter-contact activists, and published it as a PDF file. Look in the Tutorials and Guides section of the documentation page. It's pretty comprehensive with lots of screen shots.

I've also started a documentation roadmap so that you can comment on what documentation is need, and hopefully, contribute to the documentation available!

Thanks, Pat

I've been messing around with ideas for a new Advokit logo and tagline to grace the upper-left corner of the page in Advokit, as well as anchor a new theme for the Advokit Community site.

Here's what I currently am considering for a logo:

gif:

ping:

For a tagline, I'd particularly like some suggestions. It should be very short (just a couple words), perhaps a little pithy, play on words, and encapsulate the value of Advokit. Here's an utterly unfiltered list of some ideas I've been playing with:

• grassroots fertilizer
• grassroots equipment
• renewable politics
• people powered
• community supported politics
• democratic machinery

Please post your own ideas and comments here, or email the advokit-dev email list.

I'm proud to announce that as of June 8th, 2006, Advokit 1.0 is ready to help your campaign. It took a lot longer to get to the point of having something that I felt comfortable labeling "1.0" than I expected. Since we began talking about releasing 1.0 about three months ago, there have been some 160 revisions made to the code base. And though there remain a few things in the Advokit application that I want to improve in the 1.0.x version, we will soon be able to start thinking about what's next!

We're pretty happy with where Advokit's code is right now. It's quite stable, I recently consulted for a US Senate primary campaign where not a single code bug was encountered. We're just trying to nail down a few loose threads before announcing it as version 1.0.0:

• We're moving this site up to Drupal 4.7 and making significant modifications.
• We're switching to a Subversion code repository, which will be nicer than CVS in a number of ways. I really like that it will make and provide access installer tarballs in ways much more elegant than our current system.
• We're also moving everything to new servers hosted (and paid for) by CivicActions. Thanks Henri, Dan, Fen and everyone else - you are the greatest!