We’ve just released Alaveteli 0.21!

The highlights

Smoother

One of the most important things Alaveteli does is to make filing a new Freedom of Information request less daunting for members of the general public. So we’ve taken another look at the process of making a request in Alaveteli, and knocked off a few of the rough edges in the user interface. Hopefully it’s now even easier than before.

Safer

We’ve also improved security in a few places, making sure that actions taken on the site are secure against cross-site request forgery, adding sensible security headers and enforcing an expiry time on session cookies.

More accurate

There’s a new interface for administrators that lets them easily add public holidays to the database for the place where the Alaveteli site is running. This is really important in calculating correctly when requests are due for a response, according to the law.

Less spammable

Finally, in the eternal fight against spam, we’ve removed the ability of banned users to update their “About me” text. So no more spammy profiles.

You can see the full list of highlights and upgrade notes in the changelog.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed (we now have code from nearly 40 different people!)

We’ve just released Alaveteli 0.20!

The highlights

This release includes several additions and improvements to the admin interface for Alaveteli.

Here’s a summary of the highlights:

• We’ve added an admin user interface for managing the categories and headings that are used to distinguish different types of authority. Updates are now a lot easier.
• An admin can now close an authority change request without sending an email to the person who requested it. Good for handling spammy requests!
• CSV Import fields for authorities are now configurable. This is useful for themes that add additional attributes to authorities.

As for general improvements, there are plenty of those, too. For example:

• We added a fix to ensure attachments are rendered for emails sent with Apple Mail
• We removed a confusing authority preview from the process of choosing who to write to. Clicking an authority now goes straight to the authority page.
• We added filtering by request status to the requests displayed on the user profile page.
• There’s now a Health Check page, so you can tell if everything seems to be running smoothly.
• Sensible default values have been added to some configuration parameters.

You can see the full list of highlights and upgrade notes in the changelog.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed!

We’ve just released Alaveteli 0.19!

The highlights

This release we’ve been working on making Alaveteli easier to install.

• We’ve overhauled the manual install guide to be much more comprehensive.
• The email setup guide has updated instructions for Exim and Postfix, and adds some extra troubleshooting tips.
• We’ve improved the generators for some of the config files and added more – and better – examples for ones we can’t generate yet.
• Developers can now pick one of the supported operating systems to use for their Vagrant VM.

We’ve also made some great improvements to the framework.

• Added responsive stylesheets! We’ve made this the default, but you can configure whether they’re used or not in config/general.yml.
• Support for the Portuguese locale.
• Improved search term highlighting.
• The Public Body Stats page can now be made available to your users.
• Added a Rake task for cleaning up holding pen events (rake cleanup:holding_pen).
• Added searching of bodies by their short name.

You can see the full list of highlights and upgrade notes in the changelog.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed!

Ever got a problem fixed by reporting it on FixMyStreet? Written to your representative via WriteToThem? Here’s an opportunity to pay the favour forward to someone stranded on a wet Wednesday by the non-arrival of the number seven bus.

We’ve reached the point in FixMyTransport development where we can start asking for your help. We need to fill in the information we’ll use to report people’s transport problems to the companies that run bus and train routes. If you have five minutes to spare, please spend them adding a contact email address or two for your local bus companies to this spreadsheet:

http://bit.ly/aVZzlb

…then you can bask in the glory of a karmic balance restored*.

* Will also work if you accidentally ran over a kitten on your way to work this morning.

I’m happy to say that with a lot of help from Francis and Matthew I’ve just rolled out a long-requested addition to WriteToThem. You can now use the site to write one message and send it to all your representatives in a multi-member constituency – so, for example, you can send a message to all your MEPs at once. A nice side project along the way has been getting the test suite for WriteToThem running happily on a mySociety server, and adding a few more tests. Run, tests, run! Good tests.