Make a generic Alaveteli jacaranda that can be used by any of the instances

[equivalentideas]

I spoke a bit about this idea at TICTeC in April https://www.slideshare.net/mysociety/automating-feedback-the-answer-for-small-civic-tech-teams-luke-bacon-openaustralia-foundation

Some thoughts:

• many of the people who run alaveteli instances aren't developers, and they need to be able to set this up
• there's an issue with how jacaranda scrapes information about requests off the front end https://github.com/openaustralia/righttoknow/issues/673 it currently relies on an assumption about how many requests there are a fortnight on the site to work. The different Alaveteli sites have wildly different frequency of requests, and it changes, so this needs to get smarter or we need a more reliable way to get the information from the sites.
• the other teams aren't all working in English, this friendly tree should speak their language. [i18n]() will be good for translations I recon https://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n

[auxesis]

I did 10 minutes of research this evening, and I think it'll be extremely simple to implement (if you ignore i18n).

We can probably refactor the RightToKnow class to set a host to connect to based on an environment variable.

Pretty much all of the existing counting table of varieties lookups should work, regardless of the site.

[equivalentideas]

there's an issue with how jacaranda scrapes information about requests off the front end openaustralia/righttoknow#673 it currently relies on an assumption about how many requests there are a fortnight on the site to work. The different Alaveteli sites have wildly different frequency of requests, and it changes, so this needs to get smarter or we need a more reliable way to get the information from the sites.

I think that's still a problem, because we don't currently know of any way to get an accurate number for the lookups from whatdotheyknow.com . The bug that prevents the current method from working has been effectively closed as 'wont fix': https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/456#issuecomment-322976225

I've asked the Alaveteli maintainers if they know another way, but so far they don't.

One thing we could do is expand the requests api which currently includes 'hides_by_week' to include 'success_by_week', and 'new_by_week'. We could add an annotations API that did the same thing. Then we could just use the API rather than scrape the front.

... And then we could update Right To Know so we get all these goodies 😆 https://github.com/openaustralia/righttoknow/pull/686 .

🤔