Major upgrade near finished - some hiccups remain inevitable

Update 24 Feb:HTML Editor dropped. Update 9 Feb 22.00 hrs- Problems for people posting comments will be ironed out soon. 9 February: We finally have an html editor, which makes it much easier for people to write articles. You can format your text in a similar way to using a Word program. Before, our writers had to learn some html or wait for an overworked editor to publish their material. Update 8 February: Something took us off-line... fixed now. Update 7 February 2013 We have decided to return (expect some hiccups still) to the successful Drupal 6 upgrade, pending building more knowledge about Drupal 7. We want to thank LVPS Hosting workers for their generosity with their time over several days and nights in their excellent and enthusiastic work on this upgrade series. We cannot speak highly enough of this firm. A couple of years ago LVPS Hosting also managed to migrate the entire candobetter site for no extra charge. That was a truly herculean effort extending perhaps two weeks and a kindness at a time when the site was falling to bits and we were no longer able to deal with it, due to the owner, James Sinnamon's terrible accident, from which he is still suffering profound effects. Candobetter.net is not a microsoft or wordpress page out of the box. It was James Sinnamon's complex and unique personal creation over years and he has used it to promote many people's good work. It provides a consultable record of Australian grass-roots politics over about 6 years and has raised the profile of a number of major issues in Australia which the mainstream press would rather keep a lid on. We hope to be able to help James maintain this committment. Update 6 Feb Dear Contributors to candobetter.net and readers, Just letting you know what is happening at the moment. We have fixed all the old problems of the site but we are experimenting with something new, which may or may not work. Although the site looks good, we are having problems with the latest version of the Drupal content management system - Version 7. Version 7 is very free-flowing and requires creative and thoughtful technical input even to create blog and article templates - so that we can all easily post articles and comments etc. The technicians managing the upgrade are finding it difficult to work this out and so are the editors of candobetter, who are expected to test and tweak things. We don't actually have much free time to do this and have to fit it around other things e.g. at 4am. We could just go back to Version 6, which looked nice and worked well, but an adventurous spirit compels us to try a little longer. I have articles queued up ready for when we can post them and do apologise to all of you for these delays, but they are not signs of break down. We are still also coping with the different time-zones of the editors and the technicians. Version 6 fixed a lot of old bugs, so if we do go back to that, we will still have a much more robust and functional website which can do more tricks. Hopefully we will have a working text editor which will mean that contributors will not have to know html; they will be able to write as if in 'word'. If we go back to 6 we could then do the next upgrade in a year or two. So, anyway, candobetter will be up and working soon, keep preparing and sending material. Update 4 Feb 2013: The upgrade second stage is going well. There is a problem posting pictures at the moment, which will be cleared up soon. The basics are working. You can post articles and comments. In the next few days details will be adjusted so that the appearance will be more as it was before, with the magpie logo and some new applications. Thank you for your patience. Candobetter is engaged in a major planned upgrade of its content management system. It will take about a week. (The site will be backed up first of course.) The site will be on line but lots of things may go wrong: links may not work, pages may look odd ... We could even go off line unpredictably - so save your comments and articles before you post them. This is a huge job. It may not end with this first try, in which case we will try something else. We thank you in advance for your patience and ask you to be kind and loyal. Update 2 Feb 2013: So far the upgrade is going well. The basics are working. You can post articles and comments. In the next few days details will be adjusted so that the appearance will be more as it was before, with more links on the front page. Thank you for your patience. Candobetter is engaged in a major upgrade of its content management system. It will take about a week. The site will be on line but lots of things may go wrong: links may not work, pages may look odd ... We could even go off line unpredictably - so save your comments and articles before you post them. This is a huge job. It may not end with this first try, in which case we will try something else. We thank you in advance for your patience and ask you to be kind and loyal. Candobetter is a huge site. Major upgrades are a big deal technically. They are very complex. We are entering the Unknown.

Donations welcome

Naturally this is all costing money in addition to the fees we pay for hosting the site. If you would like to contribute something, you can contribute quite small or larger sums via PayPal, simply by going to "Send money" and ask for your payment to be sent to astridnova[AT]gmail.com. It's that simple. We will be grateful for any donation as it costs quite a bit in money and an awful lot in time to run candobetter.net and it is done by just two people, entirely on personal funds.

More about upgrading

Upgrading is a bit like gutting a house and rebuilding from the inside without losing the basic shape and contents, or any tiles off the roof. Will we find electronic termites? Is candobetter.net haunted? Does it need restumping? The site will be backed up first of course, so if things go wrong we just go back to the old cdb, take a breather, then start again after a while. There will inevitably be problems and we may not even succeed this first time and then may be obliged simply to return the site to its current condition, have a breather, then try again. We thank you in advance for your patience and ask you to be kind and loyal.