2013Q3 Reports: ACL Portal

Report on the ACL Portal

Joshua Herring, 9th July 2013

The ACL Portal was created to provide a web-based platform to house facilities for members that might be seen as benefits to replace the CL journal (which, until it went open access and electronic only, was a major tangible benefit of membership).

Over the last two years, I have been working part-time in maintaining the Portal. This has generally amounted to minor maintenance tasks - bug fixes, some administrative tools for Priscilla, and so on. The Portal currently serves little function other than maintaining a list of current members and a payment gateway for membership. If these are the only functions that the portal is to serve, then I would recommend integrating it with the main ACL website (see similar comments along these lines from Robert Dale in last year's report). The portal is built on top of the Drupal content management system, as is the proposed replacement for the ACL main page (built on Drupal 7), so integration involves little more than upgrading existing custom modules developed by Ben Phelan for the Portal to Drupal 7.