danasf

Ok, thanks for this bug report. I tried really quickly on three WordPress 3.1 installs to replicate this problem, wasn’t able to duplicate it. [wpcongress_legislator id=”L000551″] just worked fine for me, too. Weird. Have any customizations or plugins installed?

If you can reach the admin page, trying toggling the CURL setting , some people have luck turning when CURL on and off. School and work have been keeping me crazy busy but I hope to be able to make a major update / OOP rewrite to this plugin by late april, early may.

Great idea, I will implement the Vote Smart API in the next revision!

Hi there,
This issue usually occurs when there is not a valid sunlight api key.

Register for a Sunlight API key (it’s free, you can get one here: https://services.sunlightlabs.com/accounts/register/)

Add your key to the settings page. It’s in Plugins -> WPCongress Settings. Hit Save.

If you continue to experience this issue, try enabling CURL on the settings page and see if that helps.

~ Dana
WPCongress

Robert,
I agree, and I have started work on what I think might be a free, open source solution to this problem.

The trickiest part may be keeping Congressional form information valid over time, but with the right tools I think interested parties online may be able to accomplish this collaboratively. I will update this post when I have further information.

~ Dana

From your Dashboard choose “Pages” under the Pages tab in the sidebar. Click on your test page in the list that appears.

Place the phrase [wpcongress_form] in the HTML editor for this page and save. This will let me see if the form is working for you in standalone mode.

I think I answered your question in a separate email, but for the benefit of others who may ask I am pasting my reply:

I am aware of this issue and it’s a very frustrating circumstance! The Sunlight Foundation gives you an immense amount of data to work with, but only 20 or so members of Congress offer their email address.

Unfortunately this is intentional on the part of Congress — crying “spam” and out of concern for fraudulent communications most members of Congress opted a few years ago to discontinue their direct email addresses in favor of web-based forms. As you can imagine, this is incredibly frustrating and has made it more difficult for many constituents to communicate with their representatives. The forms they use are not standardized, so they are not easy to parse, and some require extensive amounts of information or CAPTCHAs, further reducing completion rate. There are several service providers out there that either attempt to parse forms or fax messages to congressional officials (the big ones are: Convio, Democracy In Action, Blackbaud Sphere and Capwiz), but they all have their drawbacks, and depending upon your volume they may charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars annually.

A free and open source solution may be forthcoming though, and hopefully will become part of WPCongress ??

Thanks for the heads-up. I’d love to know if the standalone congressional contact form is working for you — if you setup a page with the [wpcongress_form] tag on that’d help me troubleshoot the problem further (so I can see if it’s the form submission or widget specific).

In the interim try toggling ‘Enable Ajax Forms’ on the ‘WPCongress Config’ page, see if that makes a difference. It could also be worthwhile to double-check your sunlight foundation API key in the config area.

Thanks for the suggestion — I will try to include MOC-specific tracking in an upcoming revision!