About the SevaWebSites.org domain’s web sites: The “live sites” I build and maintain that are listed here in this PORTAL-WP site are multilingual and are here for reference only. For more information about them go to each (i.e. click on the site’s URL shown on this portal site) and then using the “Main Menu” of a live site find and click Site News or Site Tech News to respectively see and read general, less technical news about the site or to see and read more summaries of technical details and more technical news about the live site.
The progressive prototype political “test/demo” sites and multisites I build are also multilingual. Most of those listed on this PORTAL-WP site if not otherwise labeled are BETA sites; but some may be listed as ALPHA. “Alpha” means “very little about the site may be working; most of the content, if there is any, will be “ugly”. I present the alpha site on this PORTAL-WP site for those site viewers who are the most curious about “early works in progress” of political sites they might want to adopt and start using experimentally in the future if and when the alpha site or multisite becomes BETA. There are a great many of the “test/demo” sites; many of which can be accessed via the Test Sites “menu tree” at the top of most web pages.
Content of Test/Demo Sites: English is my first language and is the language with which I create “stub” content for my “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.net backup’s “Angie” restore program’s “Replace data” step, the Angie app’s page 4 during site porting by whomever is doing the site porting tasks.
For the brave and more experienced client’s database administrator (DBA) of the site’s database backup, plain text data is exported from the web host services’ cPanel phpMyadmin utility. The DBA or other GP workers with the skills can “edit strings” in the plain text file; i.e. they can edit the list-of-keywords plain text file and replace those strings with more client-appropriatate text, then import the edited-and-saved database plain text file into the client’s database via their web hosting service’s same 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”.
Four Conditions to Qualify for a Free Subscription:
You and your GP organizations and candidates, if you have or are either one, have to prove to me in writing (email usually) that (1) you are really a green and a progressive, that (2) you are a US (or Canadian) citizen, (3) that you have (or will soon find) at least 1+ technically competent Internet and computer web hosting server administration person and (4) that eventually you also will have (or will soon find) at least 1+ technically competent web site content manager and developer. There are tutorial books on the subjects of (3) and (4).
These four types of people will need 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 when a few of “your people” have become a bit accustomed to using your site and no longer need tutoring about how to use it from me.
Some Details:
The download site(s) for high-beta-number sites (if sites have beta numbers as well as the label ‘beta’), are for well tested release candidate sites and for generic versions of working ‘live’ released sites will be listed here. These may also or alternatively be called ‘prototype’ sites or ‘release candidate’ sites.
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 the download file I provide in the <domain-name>public_ftp/<site-name>/<fileName>.tar file name I provide to a client GP. A “tar” file is often called “a tar ball” by some techies including me.
If the ‘readme.txt’ or “generic-names” file is in the “tar ball” download file, it will be for the use of the site port installer. I envision it will be used as a check-list to aid him or her, the site administrator, in the otherwise very good “Akeeba.net” (a.k.a. Angie app) 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 Seva Portal Site’s “Generic” Content: This “Portal” site is sort of a table of contents listing many of my sites showing some, but not all. However, many sites listed here are (1) my multilingual LIVE Sites I created in the past originally and primarily for non-political purposes Other sites listed here are (2) “test” or “demo” or “beta” sites each showing some of the works-in-progress (w.i.p.) progressive political sites I continue to develop, albeit irregularly depending on GP demand for a particular (nation-wide or) state or county type of working site. Any instances of the latter I call my multilingual Test Sites, Demo Sites, Beta Sites and/or Experimental Sites. Some of the latter when listed on 1+ web page on this site may be given the labels: “test, demo, experimental, beta,” or “prototype” 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. A GP’s official who has a title in his or her party must submit “a letter (or memo or email) of intent to me. In this letter or memo or email s/he must write his or her title, his or her name, state his/her request and sign his or her name and date the a “letter” or “memo” or “email”. This becomes a suitable and legal “letter of intent” and is a sufficient “pledge to download and adopt” the web site currently listed only on this portal-wp web site.
Actual ability to make and setup a GP site adoption on another web hosting service implies four things, as I outlined above: (1) the client GP is or has his or her technically competent IT person(s) who will download a copy (backup tar ball) of a beta or release candidate or a deployed and working site and (2) he or she or with the party’s own people can repurpose their downloaded then restored site either as-it-is or as 1+ clone(s) or “tailored ports” of it. All those activities are free to US and Canadian Greens.
The porting and tailoring of a downloaded site restored to another web hosting service 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 site’s 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 “clone-able/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 in “distance learning” (not yet achieved) and (2) to becoming better able to get 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. At JGW-SanFrancisco.org please 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.
W.I.P. Site’s Status: WordPress (-wp), Joomla! (-j3x), and Drupal (-d7) prototyped test sites — many listed in the Test Sites section of this site — are in alpha and beta states. Alpha sites tend to be really ugly, 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 and have “stub” (place holder) content and a bit of real content to display to the site user when the user clicks on a menu or searches for content. But on beta sites some site functions are not working 100% yet. As the beta number, 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 (PF) system for project management and that PF system for the Joomla! major version 3x and 4x series of sites has been 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! 3x sites I provide to GPs are old but also 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.
Until there is a PF for Joomla! 4x, or 5x, or there’s a PM plugin for WP, use the free, full featured, if also complicated to use — and free — dotProject available to download at dotProject.net.
Updating Drupal and Backdrop Sites:
Backdrop is a sub-set of Drupal. Updating Backdrop and Drupal sites to their latest major and minor version, e.g. D7.n1.n2, or D9.n3.n4, takes more site administrator time to update. However for those site administrators, including me, who have done such site updating a few times, “first backup the <root>/sites/ folder to restore when the current version is installed in the file-system; then it can be done in less than 30 minutes.
But I have not in my 10+ years of trying to find a Drupal “Project Management Module” that can be installed on a D7+ site and be usable by site users for PM work, when they are not used to doing PM. 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. The same may be so for a D9 site.