Game plan / initial roadmap

[raquelmsmith]

Excited about collaborating on this @melchoyce!

What are your initial thoughts for what the block will do? Show recent donations?

[melchoyce]

I'm thinking:

• The initial view when you add the block is a placeholder that takes a campaign's ActBlue donation URL
• When you enter the URL, the block will fetch and load their current donation increments
• You should be able to edit or delete those increments, and add new increments
• Quick toolbar options should be:
  • Align left, center, center
  • Maybe a full-width or align-wide option?

[melchoyce]

The placeholder view:

[melchoyce]

Might also be cool to create a custom URL parameter for tracking.

Edit: Actually that might not be possible... investigating

[melchoyce]

Once you add a url:

Adding a new donation amount:

When you enter this, it should:

1. Create a new custom amount that will pre-fill in ActBlue when they click the button
2. Add another blank button after it

Note: Blank buttons won't be rendered on the front-end, or when you don't have the block selected.

Deleting a button:

You should be able to click into a button and edit its amount. When you click into a button, you also get the option to delete it.

The buttons should maybe be child blocks?

Unselected

[raquelmsmith]

Ok! Seems simple enough. I'll dig into their documentation and then come up with a development plan.

Do you have an example ActBlue campaign page we can use?

[melchoyce]

ActBlue is recommending https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dccc-1, haha, so let's just go with that.

[abdullah1908]

Thanks @melchoyce, @raquelmsmith Surely, dig into this stuff :relaxed:

[samuelcole]

hi!

so a few hints: all you really need is the form name, which would be dccc-1 for that DCCC link, then you can form an URL with https://secure.actblue.com/donate/${formName}.

we also have some nice params: amount=${amountInDollars} will prefill the form with whatever link they clicked. we do have refcode=gutenwebsite, which will let candidates see where the donations come from. i also like amounts=5,10,25, which sets the values of the buttons, so you can match them with the website.

i don't think you particularly need to scrape actblue for any of this?

[raquelmsmith]

Thanks for the hints @samuelcole! Does this info live in any documentation anywhere? I spent about 10 mins in the ActBlue docs last night and didn't see these params as options.

[samuelcole]

sorry about that!

https://support.actblue.com/tutorial#reference-codes

there isn't a more technical list of params anywhere, sadly

[raquelmsmith]

Ok, did some looking 👀 into this today. Initial dev gameplan:

• Bootstrap setup with create-guten-block
• Add placeholder view
  • For now, this won't scrape the page for preset donation amounts
• Show a few basic donation amounts ($10, $50, $100) and link those up to the page
  • set the refcode to the website name using refcode=
  • set the amount to the button amount using amount=
• Enable adding new buttons
• Enable deleting existing buttons

Any thoughts on this? Specifically, does anyone here have any preference for or against using create-guten-block for setup?

[melchoyce]

That sounds like a great game plan!

I've heard good things about create-guten-block, so let's give it a try.

[abdullah1908]

@melchoyce yeah I used create-guten-block and it works fine :+1: