Welcome to the new landing page of the California Green Party. It has a number of improvements over the old landing page.
- Looks good on cell phones, tablets and desktops. The old design only worked well on desktops and looked terrible on cell phones. This design is responsive: it looks different based on the screen size.
- Runs on WordPress rather than Drupal. Drupal is a wonderful content management system, but sadly it has fallen out of favour and the California Green Party is not able to find enough Drupal volunteers.
- Has a rich ecosystem of open source plugins and themes to draw from.
- The landing page in an introduction to the Green Party. This is great for new people joining the Green Party. On the old landing page, articles were posted. This is better for people who are already familiar with the party.
- Has a new menu bar. Carefully thought out and organized. The old site’s menu bar has links going back to 2020. This is probably related to how hard it is to find Drupal developers.
- Blog postings use square images. On cell phones, the image is centered on the page. On tablets and desktops, the image is floated left, and text wraps around it. On the old site, the images were wide. This looked great on desktops, but fell off the edge on cell phones.
- Uses short titles, followed by a longer introductory sentence. The old site have very long titles, again better for desktops.
- Works well with NationBuilder. This theme is based on Bootstrap, the leading CSS library. Both WordPress and NationBuilder support bootstrap, so the WordPress landing pages, and the NationBuilder database pages should start looking increasingly like each other.
- Is evolving rapidly. Because WordPress is popular, it is possible to find developers, and so this site is improving rapidly, and is expected to continue o improve.
If you have any questions, we invite you to post them on the Green Party tech discord server. If you would like to help, please check out the list of tech volunteer openings.
The California Green Party is (hopefully) migrating off of closed source and expensive corporate NationBuilder hosted in the US’s collapsing legal jurisdiction to open source technologies hosted in privacy protecting Europe. We hope that other US Green Parties follow suit. The first step is to build the “exteral pages” in WordPress, while leaving the “internal pages” in Drupal and the “database pages” in NationBuilder. This theme should work across platforms, and is expected to be ported to NationBuilder shortly. It is implemented usng Bootstrap. Bootstrap is the most popular CSS library, and is supported by both WordPress and NationBuilder.