Planning Integration for Drupal

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gdhp's picture
Posted by gdhp on May 31, 2013 at 11:40am

At the Isles of Scilly (the UK's smallest Local Authority) we are currently looking at redesigning our website.

I am wondering if anyone knows of how other Local Government Drupal websites have integrated planning applications into their site. Options that I have seen elsewhere so far seem to be incredibly pricey or fail to offer basic features (eg commenting on planning applications). I was wondering if there were any good examples people couple point me in the direction of.

Thanks,

George

Comments

Specs

Posted by StephenOTT on May 31, 2013 at 4:03pm
StephenOTT's picture

Do you have any specs for the Planning applications?

Using Entity Forms (https://drupal.org/project/entityform) and the commenting feature on the Content Type you would probably have all you need.

Specs would be useful

Posted by pmackay on June 5, 2013 at 9:19am
pmackay's picture

Specs would be useful. It could be relatively straightforward to create a Planning application content type that could pull from the feeds on OpenlyLocal (http://openlylocal.com/councils/12/planning_applications.html).

Then we need more scrapers: http://blog.openlylocal.com/2012/03/29/how-to-help-build-the-uks-open-pl...

Talk to the Planning Portal

Posted by socialtechno on June 5, 2013 at 7:21pm
socialtechno's picture

Talk to the Planning Portal - http://www.planningportal.gov.uk - they are the national online service for England and Wales, and they issue specifications to software developers which will enable you to develop an interface with any Local Planning Authority.

As you are an LPA, I imagine you will want to circulate applications to statutory consultatees, so you will want some kind of a workflow or workbench process to track who has been invited to comment, whether a response has been received, and the planning officer's assessment. Elected representatives and planning officers ask different kinds of questions: sometimes they want to know how many responses, sometimes who responded, sometimes they just want to know how long a decision took , and sometimes they will want to 'drill down' into the details.

Thanks for the responses

Posted by gdhp on June 11, 2013 at 1:13pm
gdhp's picture

Thanks for the responses everyone. As we're a very small authority we don't need anything overtly complex (eg systems that automatically alerted people for responses would be nice, but probably something we would look to add on as opposed to part of the initial build.)

By the looks of things I think a simple method of creating a content type with a good comment system would do the job. And then we can look to add on further fields and things where needs be. Bonus points if we can get it to rss openlylocal, or the planning portal etc.

Thanks for the input all though, I think there's enough wisdom from this for me to be able to write that section of the tender document.

Quick prototype

Posted by pmackay on June 13, 2013 at 6:04pm
pmackay's picture

I've built a simple prototype for representing planning applications:

Code here:
https://github.com/pmackay/localgov_planning

A simple demo site importing Lambeth applications from OpenlyLocal:
http://dev-opencouncil.gotpantheon.com/planning-applications

If you have additional requirements I'd be happy to work on improving it.