About the USGreenIDEAS.org site:
The “live sites” I build and maintain that are listed here in this PORTAL-WP site are setup to be multilingual by using the GTranslate plugin. I, JGW, the site developer, have not yet made Spanish web pages or posts with translations of English pages or posts on those live sites. The live sites are displayed here on this PORTAL site for reference only.
* For more information about them go to each live site (click on their name) and at the live site click News->Site News or News->Site Tech News using the “Main Menu” of the live site.
* The progressive political “prototype” or “test/demo” sites I build are also multilingual. Most of the ” Prototype/ test/demo” sites listed on this PORTAL site, if not otherwise labeled, are BETA sites. However, a very rare few may be listed as ALPHA. The alpha sites are for those site viewers curious about “early works in progress” which they I have requested I create usually for them, a progressive candidate, or for their progressive organization.
Generic & Real Content of Alpha and Beta Prototype and Test/Demo Sites:
English is my first language and is the language with which I create real, generic (place-holder, page topic-suggesting) and “stub” (titled but meaningless) content for my “prototype” and “test/demo” web sites. All posts and pages I create have what I call “generic content”, content which by technical means on-site and off-site I can change for an entire “test/demo” site text from my “generic” text to some of the “basic branded text” which a client web site adopter (e.g. candidate, party, organization) might want on a site I repurpose, provide and in some cases help them deploy on their chosen web hosting service for their use.
While the content is “generic” in what you “see and get” online now, sooner or later, so far as the site update time is available to me, I may add an automatically translated Spanish version of 1+ of the more important, at least to me, of this site’s articles, web pages and/or blog posts.
Stub content is by my definition (a) just sample, place-holder and ‘generic’ (not client specific) content, often just sparse or annotated outlines of what future-content could contain. (b) Stub site content is also generic content with keywords created by me during site creation and the text and keyword content upgraded by me before it has been adopted by a client. In the “release version” of a protytpe site (c) the keywords will be in a separate “readme” plain-text list so that they can all be easily found and modified during an Akeeba backup’s “Angie” restore program’s “Replace data” step, Angie page 4 during site porting by whomever is doing the site porting tasks. For trhe brave and experience client’s DBA the ssite database backup, lain text if exported from the seva phpMydmin utility, can “edit strings” in the list-of-keywords plain text file and replace those strings with more client-appropritate text, then import the edited-and-saved database into the client’s database via their web hosting service’s phpMyAdmin utility program.
I hope when I have a site’s maturity to “release candidate” state, I will have made more administrator and end -user “tutorial web pages” as well as other “help files” for those categories of site users regarding site features, how site administrators can (re)configure them and how site end-users can use them.
For sites that are to be easily ported and tailored for a client’s uses, unless the client provided me examples of content s/he or his or her organization wants, the real content I create is also my idea of generic first-draft content as summarized just above. Unless I have explicit content supplied by a client, I “make it up” in the following ways: In a WordPress (WP) site’s blog posts or article-like pages, in Joomla! and in Drupal articles, I limit my use of the names or the client’s ‘branding names’ in that content such as the name of a political party or candidate name or a state or county or city. Then I might write a very short, vague ‘generic’ summary of a typical party or candidate or an organization’s mission statement. Something giving an example to a site-requesting client who does not yet know what to say or something a future site owner and operator can quickly find and change — once they own, operate, and have learned to use their web site — to suit their purposes.
ALL OF MY BETA PROTOTYPE SITES ARE FREE TO DOWNLOAD AND USE AND UPGRADE BY PROGRESSIVE THE WEBMASTERS / WEB MAESTRAS OF THE 47 USA GREEN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THEIR CANDIDATES. Subscriptions that allow downloads will be installed “soon”.
But you and your GP organizations and candidates, if you have one, have to prove to me you are really a green and a progressive, that you are a US (or Canadian) citizen, and that you have (or will soon find) at least 1+ technically competent Internet and computer web hosting server administration person and eventually also have (or will soon find) at least 1+ technically competent web site content manager and developer. These people will take over your day-to-day management of your site once I have set it up, or helped your administrator(s) set it up, and a few of “your people” have become a bit accustomed to using your site and no longer need tutoring from me.
The download site(s) for high-beta-number sites, for well tested release candidate sites and for generic versions of working ‘live’ released sites will be listed here.
For those downloadable sites generic ‘branding names’ used in a particular downloadable site, information of that kind will be listed in a ‘readme’ or ‘generic names’ text file bundled into (i.e. as a part of the compressed site folders and files) I provide to a client. The ‘readme’ or “generic-names” file will be for the use of the site port installer. I envision it be used as a check-list to aid him or her, the site administrator, in the automated porting and site tailoring of key aspects of their new site at site-restoration time on their target web hosting server.
Summary of This Site’s Content: This “Portal” site is sort of a table of contents of many of my sites showing some, but not all, of (1) my multilingual LIVE Sites I created in the past originally and primarily for non-political purposes and (2) some of the works-in-progress (w.i.p.) progressive political sites I continue to develop, which I call my multilingual Test Sites, Demo Sites and Experimental Sites. Some when listed on this site may be given “test, demo, or experimental” labels as well.
Those w.i.p. sites are primarily those I want to make public, admittedly to attract inquires that may lead to the inquiring progressive person’s or party’s or candidate’s pledge to adopt 1+ of them. Actual site adoption implies the client or his or her technically competent IT person will download a copy of a beta or release candidate or deployed and working site and with their own people who can repurpose their site either as-it-is or as clones or “tailored ports” of it. The tailoring and porting of a downloaded site is to be done by the adopter’s, a.k.a. the client’s, “web site administration and site content management experts” a.k.a. future site competent administrators and competent web site content managers of the content authors and editors. They may be volunteers of paid staff of 1+ progressive political parties and candidates who want to or have adopted one of my “cloneable/portable” web sites. The list of what I consider to be ‘the most important’ and urgently to-be-adopted of my in-development sites are in the Test Sites / Experimental Sites section of this “Portal” site.
My Background Summarized: For over four decades I, JGW: Jennifer Gopinathadasi Woodward, have been a self-taught computer systems designer, developer, solo and lead unit and integrated systems tester, and systems documentation provider. In the 1980s I completed four college degrees related to my (1) pursing a PhD (not yet achieved) and (2) to getting better grants to pursue my life-long interest the R&D of and providing of above average free and low cost distance learning to the “poorest of the poor”. In the last 10 years I also have also been a self-taught web sites designer and content developer. See my résumés, a mixed summary of several and one for each major work area in which I have had significant work experience. My work experiences have ranged (from most experience to least) computers, instructional design and instructional content development, audio-visual content production, and stand-up training. To repeat, my education and work experiences you will find at JGW-SanFrancisco.org . Using an online form I provide on the JGW-SanFrancisco.org site, please consider making a request that I mock-up or develop a test site for you. Providing progressive political web sites, since 2010 exclusively for the US Green Party, US state GPs, then also for Bernie Sanders and the progressive candidates he and “his people” supported, became my foremost concerns up to and into the 2015-2016 election season. But I now hope to clone and port, or have web experts for other progressive parties and candidates clone and port, these ‘generic’ sites I provide for other USA and Canada progressive groups and even for progressives groups in other off-shore countries eventually to do the same as well.
CAVEATS: Drupal 9 versions may be much easier to use to setup and use sites than have been Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 core and modules. However, site administrators attempting to install D8 or D9 core will also need to learn how to use Composer. Composer is the client utility program (an administrator’s home-office computer’s app) which easily works-around several of Drupal 8 and 9 “gotcha” and “work time” increasing administrator activities. More to much more time is required to upgrade or migrate a Drupal 8 or 9 site, or multi-site. Daunting activities if you have never used Drupal before and you do not use the Composer app.
As of end of 2022 Drupal.org site has been “pushing” new Drupal users to use their Drupal 10 version.
Hey! At least core Drupal and modules for Drupal are still free! However, named “distributions” of pre-setup Drupal core and modules using D7, D8, D9, and D10 are not free.
W.I.P. Site’s Status: As of Feb-March 2023 I am teaching myself to setup and use a Drupal 9 site. To-date since 2010 I have used WordPress (-wp), Joomla! (-j3x), and Drupal (-d7) to make prototype beta sites. My prototyped BETA sites that are public are listed in the Prototype BETA Sites section of this PORTAL site.
On request by email an Alpha site I have been developing pro-bono for a progressive client may be listed on a page of this PORTAL site. An Alpha site tends to be really ugly, and almost unusable yet. But the ‘intent’ of an alpha site once it becomes a beta site can be obvious to those more familiar with site development.
In my beta sites, more parts of the site’s user interface (UI) are “intuitively obvious” and therefore usable by computer novices. Beta sites in their first instances (a.k.a. minor versions) have “stub” (place holder) blank or generic content. As I and/or a client mature content on a BETA site, at first a bit then more and more real content is shown to display to the real orimagined site’s end-user what s/he expect to see in that art of the BETA site when the user clicks on a menu or searches for content. But on a BETA site some site functions may not be working 100% properly yet. If the BETA site has a majorand minor number after the word “BETA”, e.g. Beta-1 or Beta-1.0. Beta-1.3, Beta-1.4, etc. then the beta number, Also e.g. beta-1, beta-2, …, beta-20, etc. increases for a listed site, more functions are working and more real content is available on the site.
Site Porting WebWare: Because I use Akeeba Backup on all my WP and Joomla sites, I or a client site’s administrator can quickly clone one of my sites, ‘tailor’ the generic party (or candidate’s) name, state and county names for the ‘client’s brand’, install the tailored port on another web hosting provider and the ported for the client’s needs will be ready for the client’s administrators and content contributors to start using in about one hour.
Project Management WebWare: At this update writing in June 2019 WP5 does not have a working project management plugin. But WP5 has robust site user groups management, on-site (private) site users communications and collaborative content development tools. And it has “good enough” work flow management — almost as good as having a project management plugin. The few Joomla sites listed use the no longer developed ProjectFork system for project management and that PF system for the Joomla! major version 3x series of sites is definitely good enough” for most small to medium sized projects not familiar with ‘real’ medium to larger sized projects project management (PM) software. So the Joomla! sites I provide are primarily for project management automation assistance to small groups and those sites — and the PM software on the site — are fast to build and configure for your organization’s needs.
Drupal sites, mine and anyone else’s, take more time to update. However for those site administrators, including me, who have done such site updating a few times, it can be done in less than 30 minutes. But I have not in 10+ years of trying found a Drupal “Project Management Module” that can be installed on a site and be usable by site users for PM work. Nevertheless, creating ‘multiple sites’ with a single Drupal version 7 core is supposed to be easy to do — if the administrator has done it before.