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Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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  • 7 Feb 2012
    e-government, technology
    api, gds, govuk, saulcozens

    Saul's gov.uk plugin now on Github; anyone know Ruby?

    Saul's plugin: 24 hours later

    I blogged earlier today about Saul Cozens and his ‘v0.1 alpha’ WordPress plugin for embedding gov.uk content via WordPress shortcode.

    The great news is, Saul has uploaded it to a public repo at Github, meaning it’s now:

    • dead easy for you to download, and keep up to date
    • possible for you to fix, enhance and generally improve it

    Saul has very foolishly kindly given me commit privileges on it, and I’ve done a bit of work on it this evening – a bit of error handling / prevention, adding basic parsing of gov.uk’s multi-page ‘guide’ content (including any videos!), and general housekeeping.

    In other words, it’s now less likely to simply fail on your page. It’s likely to fail in more complicated ways instead. 🙂

    There’s one substantial catch: and this is an appeal for help.

    The platform’s content is marked up, so it turns out, using an extension of the Markdown language, which they’re calling govspeak.

    It adds a number of extra formatting options, to create things like information and warning ‘callout’ boxes. And whilst there are PHP based libraries for Markdown, which we can bolt on easily, there’s nothing instantly WordPress-friendly for this new govspeak.

    Yet. If you know a bit of ruby, if you’ve got a bit of spare time, and if you want to help expand the reach of govuk’s content to charities, community groups, local government, etc etc… now’s your chance.

    If you fancied one of those £73,000pa developer jobs, I bet it would look great on your application. 😉

  • 7 Feb 2012
    e-government, technology
    api, gds, govuk, saulcozens, wordpress

    New plugin embeds gov.uk forms within WordPress

    Saul Cozens has done a wonderful thing. He’s written a WordPress plugin which allows you to integrate content from the new gov.uk site within WordPress pages. You add a WordPress shortcode, of the form:

    [govuk url="https://www.gov.uk/vat-rates"]

    It pulls in the corresponding JSON data – which is really just a case of adding .json on the end of the URL – and plonks it into your WordPress page. So far, so not tremendously complicated.

    Here’s the good bit. No, sorry, the fantastic bit. Not only does it plonk the text in, it can also plonk forms into place. And keeps them active as forms. Yes – actual, working forms.

    My screenshot above is taken from my test server: no offence Saul, but I’m not putting a v0.1 alpha plugin on my company site! – but it shows me successfully embedding the Student Finance Calculator ‘quick answer’ form within my current blog theme, and sending data back and forth. Sure, the CSS needs a little bit of work… but Saul’s concept is proven.

    Game on.

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