Version 0.2 of the State Decoded is now available for download from the project’s Github page. (Or you can grab it directly as a 308 KB tarball.) It consists of 21 enhancements, notably including:

• Ongoing work to “de-Virginia-ize” the codebase, necessary because the software was developed originally just for the Code of Virginia. This includes full abstraction of the structure storage system, moving away from Virginia-specific nomenclature (“title,” “chapter,” “code,” etc.),
• Significant optimizations, including the dynamic creation of a SQL view to access structural data and moving to using section IDs instead of section numbers.
• A parser for law histories.
• The establishment of a general metadata table to allow the storage and display of arbitrary types of information on a per-law law.
• Initial steps towards integrating Solr into the project.
• Support for storing multiple versions of the same law (e.g., both the 2011 and 2012 revisions) simultaneously.

As with v0.1, this version is an alpha release—there’s no installer, documentation, administrative backend. It’s only for the brave or curious. Virginia Decoded and Sunshine Statutes (Florida) are not running on this release but, instead, a modified version. Each release will get closer to providing all of the functionality of these live sites with the flexibility and abstraction to provide the same functions for other states, and I remain optimistic that v0.3 will be the release that can be installed on these live sites, so that I can eat my own dog food.