Hello everyone,

If you're looking to set up a new Parliamentary monitoring site then you should look at our Pombola probject at http://www.mysociety.org/international/pombola/ which takes the lessons we've learned from writing and running TheyWorkForYou and uses them to create a modern, flexible and more easily adaptable platform for creating your own Parliamentary monitoring site. We strongly encourage people to use this rather than trying to adapt TheyWorkForYou to their own requirements.

If you want to dig in to the source of TheyWorkForYou then carry right on below.

We're pleased to release the TheyWorkForYou.com source code. This is the code for the website itself. It's mainly written in PHP, although there are also some Perl scripts for database loading and indexing. The backend parser code is separate and available on GitHub. You can read more about this on TheyWorkForYou's parser info page

The TheyWorkForYou.com source code in this distribution is released under a BSD style license. Roughly, this means you are free to copy, use, modify and redistribute the code or binaries made from the code. Commercial or non- commercial use is allowed. However, we disclaim warranty, and expect you not to use our name without our permission.

See the file LICENSE.md for exact legal information.

Everything MPs say in the UK's House of Commons is recorded in a document called Hansard. TheyWorkForYou.com helps make sense of this vital democratic resource and, crucially, allows you to add your own annotations and links to the official transcripts of Parliament.

See INSTALL.md for installation questions.

If you have questions, the best place to ask is the mySociety TheyWorkForYou email list at https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!forum/theyworkforyou

You will need the latest versions of VirtualBox and Vagrant, then:

• Stick an entry in your hosts file to point twfy.mysociety at 192.168.88.10 (Apache doesn't like IP addresses).
• Run vagrant up.
• Go make a cup of tea. It may take a while whilst Vagrant and Puppet do their thing.
• Point your web browser at http://twfy.mysociety and marvel at modern technology.

If you're working on a page which uses the redesign, you will need to compile static assets after changes:

• vagrant ssh
• cd /data/twfy/www/docs/style
• compass compile for a one-off compilation or compass watch to recompile on changes

TheyWorkForYou includes a test suite, using PHPunit. To run tests, ensure that the environment variables TWFY_TEST_DB_HOST, TWFY_TEST_DB_NAME, TWFY_TEST_DB_USER and TWFY_TEST_DB_PASS are set and contain relevant information for your testing database. The database will be stripped down and rebuilt during testing, so make sure it's not an important copy.

You may find that in some versions of PHPUnit errors are thrown regarding code coverage reports. If this is the case, the version installed by Composer and located at /vendor/bin/phpunit should run correctly.