European Space Weather Portal

The European gateway to Space Weather resources

History of the Portal

Portal was developed in the framework of the COST724 action

BISA has installed Drupal CMS. People involved were

Koen Stegen – Administration & databases(2006 – Februari 2007)

Jan Wera – Administration & applications(2006 – Februari 2007)

Bart Declercq – Webmaster(Februari – June 2007)

Problems from the Past

The glossary: the system added links to glossary terms in other pages but the link would take the user to the first term in the glossary instead of the correct one.

The navigation menu: when using the portal navigation menu, sometimes the user got a search box when clicking on a random menu item instead of the page associated with the menu item.

Solution

Finding out what was needed to fix the problems at hand and implement solutions would have taken a lot of time.

Installing a new system from scratch has taken less time than solving the problems.

Result: new Drupal installation (version 5.7 vs 5.2 on spaceweather.eu) where everything works as it's supposed to with additional content and a new look.

http://gauss.oma.be/ESWEPNEW

Improvements

New and improved graphical design Better navigation: the menu’s are now only

2 levels deep Additional content (MIM software, new

translations in different languages, ... ) Newsletter

MIM Software

Menu and Newsletter

Translations

Future Improvements

Event organizing possibilities Forum Automatic translations Dictionary Improved menu's Automatically generated downloadable

PDF's

Multilingual Issues

Due to the fact that some languages use other characters it takes more time to add translations in such languages to the portal.

Example: when we received the Space Weather definition translations in a Powerpoint presentation, there was an image for translations in Armenian and Japanese. It is impossible to just copy paste these translations and add them to the site.

Changes Requested

Add Austrian flag Done Put up the correct flag for Serbia Done Add Jean's book Done Add Slovenian translation of the

introduction Done Add translations for the definition of Space

Weather Done Add Hebrew translation of the introduction

Todo

Books

Model Access

Artwork

Data Access

Final Words

System needed to be re-installed and the content manually ported

Now there is a new and improved system Still needs in-depth testing New system still needs to be tailored to the

expectations of the users. Comments welcome