MAPLight.org

MAPLight.org is a Drupal site I’ve been working with for quite awhile. Their upgrade to Drupal 6 and redesign launched last week. We worked with Chapter Three for design and theming; and MAPLight’s excellent team for the idea, research, and quite detail-oriented QA. It is already getting some mentions in the media.

Both money and legislative data sources have modules to pull the same source data into your database. OpenSecrets Open Data for donations to U.S. Congress; Legislature for votes and more from GovTrack.us. MAPLight’s research is available in an API.

This marks the end of my direct responsibility for Drupal 5 sites. That leaves Drupal 5 itself to maintain, where the issue queue has been quiet. With no real sites to test and no SimpleTest coverage, core releases will be a little more stressful, but not much is changing. Remember, Drupal 7’s release is Drupal 5’s end of life.

At MAPLight I occasionally have to convert CSV files to SQL. The Table Wizard module handles the import well, but the columns are all long text.

I made a quick module to resize the columns. It uses Table Wizard’s built-in analysis and Drupal’s Schema API to do some basic conversions. It is nowhere near complete functionality or UI-wise. Just barely good enough to get me through 12 tables with 165 columns.

I put it on GitHub since it is incomplete and I don’t have time to do more work. And I wanted to try out GitHub.

I have been doing Drupal development and database work for MAPLight.org. They completed a new report, Remote Control, showing locations of contributions to U.S. House members. On average, 79% of contributions are from outside the congressperson’s district. I helped import and export the data, run queries and built out pages like legislator geography.