Upgrading this WLTRes site's CMS from Joomla v1.5.x to Joomla v2.5.x
And this effort takes some time to plan and practice. So the Maha Mayan Solstice holidays (days before and since the 12/21/12 mislabeled end-of-the-world) seemed like a good time to start that effort.
I, JGW the WLTRes web site creator, developer and thus far the sole content provider have not "really worked" on adding content to this site since about mid 2011. I changed my focus to work 3/4 to full-time, on-spec (for free) to build-out and enrich content on another Joomla! powered web site I created, CAGreenIDEAS.org.
Why my change in focus in 2011? I could not remain passive, willfully powerless, and ignore national politics any longer about the destructive social, economic, political and public health effects of the prolonged, horrific political polarization occurring in the US Congress. This has been a polarization and decay process that has gone on since Ronald Reagan won the US office of President in 1980. It was made dramatically worse, we "liberals and progressives" thought only for a few years, in the mid 1990s when Newt Gingrich, newly elected speaker of the US House of Representatives, declared his "Contract on America." His contract was a plan to get radical Republicans to work in unison to shut down the US Government if necessary in order to impose their radical right wing conservative policies on the nation. Those activities took an only slightly different tack in 2000-2008 when George W. Bush controlled the White House.
But those trends dramatically increased when the Republicans won the majority of seats in the US House of Representatives in the Nov. 2010 General Election. That political shock came a mere two years after Obama had exercised his "Yes We Can" politics of hope in his first two years of term #1 and the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. The Republicans in the House and Senate in 2010-2012 demonstrated they could impose minority rule on the entire nation if a few radical Senators merely threatened a filibuster on more liberal proposed legislation.
I believed as have many progressives that the Democrat-Republican "polarization" in Congress and the planned stalemate in government that has brought USA positive national and world influence to its knees, a state which has dismayed most of the country and the world for several decades, is the result of over 30 years of an increasingly astute and effective radical right wing propaganda attack on the population of the USA.
In 2010 the threats to our USA democracy were the most dire I have ever seen them be in my 6 decades long lifetime. They became overtly fascistic during the George W. Bush years 2000-2008 especially including his unwarranted and illegal military invasion of Iraq after 9/11. The internal conditions in the US government, its intelligence agencies and the Dept. of Defense which prompted that invasion had not changed by 2010. Almost as bad in my opinion has been the carefully planned, long intended corruption of the US legal system, the deregulation of big business and weakening of the "social safety net" in the USA, never a net which the rest of the developed workd -- with universal health care -- ever much admired. Finally there was the Global Financial System collapse of 2007-08, triggered by Wall Street casino-style investing, a kind of coup de grace after 30 years of a slow motion, super-rich financed coup d'etat to overthrow the USA government and co-opt US military operations world-wide. The resulting Global Great Recession continues to this day.
The USA Nov. 2012 General Election is now over. The Democrats, still so very inept in responding to these threats, made a few notable gains nation-wide. I and other Green Party members are learning our latest set of lessons in hopes we will do better next time. I have more "free time" available and can now focus more of it on enriching content and features on this web site.
As a result:
- The state of this web site and it's content, largely unchanged since mid 2011, will now change more frequently and noticeably.
- This web site will under go an upgrade from the increasingly archaic and as of Sept. 2012 the no longer supported version 1.5.x of the Joomla! CMS. Version 2.5.x is now suitably stable and the Joomla! third party extension (add-on code) developers have caught up in their upgrade activities so that a version 2.5.x site with all the old v1.5.x features and many new features is now more practical for site owner-operators like me to create and deploy to the public.
- I will be performing the Joomla! site upgrades in the remainder of November, 2012, through December 2012, and if necessary into early January 2013. You, the site visitor and any site users will see the difference when I think I have a suitably stable version 2.5x copy of this site ready.
- Many of the site navigation features I added to CAGreenIDEAS.org in past months will soon appear on this web site.
- PS: I need to fix the "very big home page font size" problem I accidentally introduced to this web site in the last few months.
Happy Winter Solstice Holidays!
