Eionet Portal Improvement Project - Fourth progress email to the NFP/Eionet Group

A blog post initially published 2 January 2019 on the former Eionet Portal prototype

Dear Colleagues,

I wish you all a Happy New Year and would like to inform you about the progress made within the Eionet Portal project in the latter half of November (since the 13 November Webinar<https://forum.eionet.europa.eu/nfp-eionet/library/1-nfp-eionet-meetings/nfp-eionet-meetings-2018/webinars-nfp-eionet-2018/nfp-webinar-10-spetember-2018-10-00-cet>) and in December last year.

Following up the consultation in the autumn, the comments made on the Portal project blog<https://fusia.eu/posts/> and by the Eionet Portal subgroup (see the webinar presentation), as well as the conclusion of the Webinar, we reorganised the current Eionet Portal<http://eionet.europa.eu/> on the old IT platform and made the agreed changes to the navigation.

Simultaneously, we started the preparation for the migration of the Portal to the new IT platform (the Plone<https://plone.org/> Content Management System, used also for the EEA website) by creating a Plone website<https://plone5demo.eionet.europa.eu/> with the same new structure and navigation. So far, this is based on a standard Plone installation, without any IT or design developments.

With this new prototype website we could already as of 1 January offer the new ETCs a modern IT platform to develop their websites<https://plone5demo.eionet.europa.eu/etcs> on, rather than developing these first on the old platform for a later migration to the new one.

Furthermore, in November and December we refined the new Eionet Planner<https://eionetplanner.eionet.europa.eu/> in cooperation with the abovementioned subgroup. Given the limited time available, we built the Planner using an off-the-shelf calendar software available for WordPress<https://wordpress.com/> rather than developing it on the Plone site (we had committed ourselves to make the new Planner available for use on 1 January 2019, while the new Plone based Eionet portal will only become operational later in the year)

We have added the link to the new Planner to the main menu of the Eionet portal (under “Workspace”) and you can find the link to the new Plone Portal prototype under the left-column links once you have entered the NFP/Eionet Interest Group on the Eionet Forum.

The WordPress site<https://fusia.eu/> that we have used since summer 2018 as a test site for prototyping the new Portal has now be discontinued (but will still be kept open for a while for references to steps taken under 2018)

Looking forward to working with you in 2019 to finalise the Eionet Portal project 2018-2019.

Best regards,

Sigfús

Sigfús Bjarnason
Eionet Systems Coordination
Coordination and Strategy Programme (CAS)