News

A bit about SpeakOut!

SpeakOut! has always been a labour of love. Many years ago I was using the speakup petition plugin but it had some bugs, needed some features added and was out of date.

I tried everything to contact the original developer but couldn’t track them down. I am not sure they even used their real name.

WordPress plugins are all open source, so I “forked” (took the code and built on it) speakup and SpeakOut! was born.

The original developer did a fabulous job, but they would hardly recognise it these days. I have fixed and added loads of things and spent a lot of time on it. So much time, for nothing, that it was starting to get a bit of a chore…I actually don’t use the plugin myself, that campaign (which we won!) is long over.

I know how useful this plugin is, so rather than abandon SpeakOut! myself, I decided to make the Pro version, it will commit me to ongoing development. I really hope that the free version is very useful for activists. Having been part of many campaigns, I know that expenses often come out of people’s pockets.

For the rest of you, if SpeakOut! is useful, please upgrade, it encourages me to improve it.

FWIW, I detest the subscription license model ($x per month or year) so the Pro version of SpeakOut! is available for a one time ever payment.

Steve

Roadmap

Possible future features:

    • Additional drop down field
    • Ability to edit signatures
    • Add an email share button to share  “I signed this petition”.
    • Include AJAX check to see if email address has been used before when it is entered i.e. before submission (under consideration)
    • One click to send multiple petitions   declined – open to abuse

More language translations

The translations were a bit of a mess.  Some files were named wrongly so didn’t work.  Some phrases were missing.  And, to be honest, I had no idea how translations and WPML (Word Press Multi Lingual) worked.

But I soon discovered that it is difficult to update translations or add new ones…especially if you don’t speak that language.

So I purchased poedit and I have to say that while not quite a breeze, translations are now manageable.  The biggest hassle is when I add or change a string, I have to update, check, compile and upload each individual language file.  So I won’t be doing that too often.

So far there are:

  • Dutch nl_NL (Kris Zanders)
  • Finnish fi_FI
  • French fr_FR
  • German de_DE (Hannes Heller, Armin Vasilico, Andreas Kumlehn)
  • Hebrew he_IL (Oren L)
  • Italian it_IT (MacItaly)
  • Norwegian nb_NO
  • Polish pl_PL (Damian Dzieduch)
  • Romanian ro_RO (Web Hosting Geeks)
  • Russian ru_RU (Teplitsa)
  • Slovenian sl_SI (MA-SEO)
  • Spanish es_ES
  • Swedish sv_SE (Susanne Nyman Furugård @sunyfu)

If your language is missing and you are willing to check over what I provide for glaring or humourous mistakes, use the contact form.