v1.0

This is the v1.0 release of The State Decoded.

• Created plugin system.
• Refactored file exports, added downloads for EPUB, PDF, Word, and others.
• Replaced PHP's SimpleXML with DomDocument for better handling of mixed content XML on imports.
• Finish editions support.
• Cleaned up import process for better visual display and error handling.
• Added full environment test and import abilities to the command line tool.
• Lots of visual tweaks and minor fixes.

Editions and Search Improvements

• Added support for multiple editions of a code in one database, to store revisions of the code over time.
• Created a generic search wrapper, fixed several search-related bugs.
• Moved to using Solarium to interface with Solr, eliminating the need for XSLT to transfer State Decoded XML to Solr XML.
• Made Solr optional, because getting it installed and running was too great an obstacle for many people. Users can now choose to use a more basic search system, built in MySQL.
• Versioned the database with migrations, which are stored in includes/migrations.
• Included a new command line tool, statedecoded. It manages database migrations, and allows importing data from the command line. It is extensible—new tasks can be added in includes/task/.
• Made various bug fixes and design tweaks.
• This will certainly break most installations. Review carefully the changes to config-sample.inc.php, class.State-sample.inc.php, and the usage of the statedecoded tool.

Bug Fix and Court Opinions

• Fixed a bug that was causing bulk downloads to take a very long time to be generated.
• Added an interface to CourtListener's API to display court decisions relevant to each law.
• Created a metadata storage function to improve extensibility.
• Increase the size of tooltip text to improve legibility.
• Provided a series of small bug fixes.

Design and Search

• Conducted a complete user interface overhaul. Everything is different: SASS-based layout, a responsive design, a pluggable template system, and a great deal more.
• Conducted a complete overhaul of the code structure, adding a routing system and a permalinks table.
• Baked in support for Apache Solr, the best text indexing software available, to ingest and analyze all laws, and create a comprehensive search system.
• Added an API method for search.
• Created a heavily automated setup process, making it easy to install.
• Added a rigorous set of environmental tests to make sure that the server has all necessary software.
• Created support for non-unique section identifiers (e.g., when a § 100 exists in 10 different Titles within a single code), a major overhaul.
• Packaged a default home page, that looks good for any site right out of the box.
• Included a sample XSLT, to serve as a starting point for those who have XML that they need to get into The State Decoded's XML format.
• Tested The State Decoded in a wide variety of server configurations and made many modifications to ensure that it runs well under nearly all common environments.
• Added an entire workflow to handle new editions of legal codes, important for those codes that are updated frequently.
• Bulk downloads are automatically created, as plain text, JSON, and XML, along with a page for visitors to download them.
• Overhauled the administrative interface, adding a great deal of functionality.
• Builds a sitemap.xml automatically.
• Included Dublin Core tags in the HTML for each law, to support Zotero and similar software.

Optimizations

• Made extensive optimizations throughout the entire codebase and within MySQL, eliminating all sources of PHP errors of level E_NOTICE and above.
• Added support for import, storage, and display of arbitrary metadata fields.
• Added APC support, and implemented caching of API keys, constants, and templates.
• Added Varnish support, to clear the Varnish cache upon running the importer.
• Replaced MDB2 with PDO, eliminating an installation requirement and modernizing database connectivity.
• Replaced HTML Purifier with Tidy, which more servers are likely to have installed already.
• Added support for port numbers in site URLs, to facilitate development on Vagrant.
• Provided comments for all non-obvious database columns, to improve extensibility.
• Normalized all code along PEAR standardards, or at least our own variant of PEAR.
• Added Dublin Core metadata tags to each law, in case that's useful to somebody for something.
• Created the infrastructure for an extensible inline help text.
• Implemented keyboard navigation within laws and structures.
• Baked in support for Disqus-based commenting on each law page.
• Implemented a logger and debug system within the parser, to improve reporting and error handling.
• Added production of bulk plain text and JSON versions of laws.
• Reduced substantially the parser's memory usage, eliminating out-of-memory errors affecting larger legal codes.