2013Q3 Reports: ACL Web Site

The ACL website continues to serve as the primary online resource for the organization. It contains the main ACL site, an ACL Wiki which serves as a resource to the general computational linguistics community, an ACL Admin wiki used to store and maintain ACL specific resources such as reports, handbooks, and policies as well as an exec wiki reserved for the use of ACL execs. We also maintain mirrors of individual ACL conference websites, membership email lists for ACL announcements and a listing of resolutions of the ACL Exec Committee.

This year, 5 new resolutions were passed by the ACL Exec Committee and they were added to the list maintained on the Admin Wiki.

As part of the 7 May ACL resolution, we have hired a new webmaster, Joshua Herring, who was previously the developer of the ACL Portal. Work has begun on a replacement site for the current main website. This was undertaken because the current main site is built on quite an old version of Joomla! from which there is no direct upgrade path. The replacement site is being built in Drupal 7 with the goals of giving it a more responsive design and a broader range of content and to integrate with the existing ACL Portal. Current work focuses on creating an integrated login system so that the website, Portal, Anthology, etc. can use a single set of logins and user metadata to enable downstream activities (registration of papers, membership and bibliometrics).

Currently, Josh has worked for about 55 hours on the webmaster portfolio, accruing about USD 850 in expenses, out of the 10K allocated for the IO budget as a whole. Most of this has been on the website maintenance and upgrading (about 2/3rds) and the remainder on the integration/login focus as well as routine duties.

The very-much related work in the Information Officer (of which the website is a part of the overall portfolio) is also available as a 2013 Q3 report here.