Madison v1.8 — The OpenGov Foundation’s open source software project that facilitates collaborative policymaking between citizens, governments, and stakeholders — has just been released in beta. This release is The OpenGov Foundation’s first semantic version release of Madison and includes many significant changes to the project, including a complete aesthetic redesign, a move to a single page application architecture, stability improvements, and a significant contribution to the project’s documentation. While the main goal for version 1.8 was the design overhaul, there are many other improvements included in this release as well. We invite you to play with Madison v1.8 and would love to hear both your feature requests and the bugs you find. Please open a new issue on Github or drop us a line with how we can make Madison better for the next release.
Redesign
We gave Madison a much-needed facelift from the ground up with design help from the wonderful John Athayde at Meticulous. It’s a beautiful improvement from the previous layout and will make it much easier to digest and navigate the content in Madison. The homepage has improved from the simple list of documents to include a ‘Featured Document’, a list of recent documents, and more compact lists displaying recently active and most active documents. We’ve also given the document page a notable overhaul by adding paragraph-level annotation anchors, and moving the annotation conversations to a sidebar slider.
Architecture
Non-developers proceed with caution!
We’ve moved Madison from a hybrid Laravel blade / Angular template architecture to a pure AngularJS application that pulls from the Laravel APIs. There are many advantages to this approach. First of all, it greatly reduces the load time moving from page to page, as each request is only hitting an API and rendering the data instead of a full page load response from the server. The assets are downloaded once, cached, and from then on only small chunks of data are loaded. This makes the UI much more responsive, as often only small parts need to be re-rendered. An important, but less impactful advantage is also the separation of front-end code and back-end code, which makes it easier for specialized developers to contribute. We’ve also cleaned up the theming system quite a bit. By including Bootstrap in the Sass compilation process, it is much easier to customize or extend the default Bootstrap settings. We’ve separated many of the frequently customizable Madison theme options into Sass configuration files for easier theme manipulation. The new designs also carefully lay out the content using a vertical rhythm for ease of reading. Instructions for modifying the theme can be found in the Theming Documentation.
Stability
The 1.8 release includes hard version numbers for both Bower and Composer dependencies, so that we’ll no longer be fighting with outdated or out of sync packages. We’re also using a simple build process with Grunt to manage all sass, css, and javascript assets that includes minification, concatenation, and cache-busting. All assets compile down to `app.js` and `app.css` files and include version-specific cache-busting queries in the compiled `index.html` file. This process supports local development environments that pull from the non-minified, non-concatenated assets as well. See the build process documentation for details.
Documentation
We’ve put a great deal of effort into updating the project’s documentation. This includes installation instructions, instructions for site administrators, and developer/contributor documentation. The documentation can be found on ReadtheDocs, and we encourage (nay, beg) for any and all questions/feedback. Pull requests are always welcome as well!
What’s next?
We’ve laid out the next few versions of Madison as project milestones on Github.
Version 2.0 will be entirely developer focused. We want to make contributing to Madison as easy as possible. This is a major version upgrade, as we will be upgrading the Laravel core framework. These changes will include an upgrade to the latest version of Laravel, replacing the broken Vagrant setup with Laravel’s Homestead, and adding a testing suite. Version 2.1 will merge The OpenGov Foundation’s Drafting Platform into Madison for drafters and site administrators. The greatest benefit of this upgrade will be a drafting environment that is specifically tailored to lawmakers and their staff. This includes suggesting internal edits, document versioning, structure linting, and many other features specific to the legal drafting domain.
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