CIFOR

Center for International Forestry Research

Overview

CIFOR advances human wellbeing, environmental conservation and equity by conducting research to inform policies and practices that affect forests in developing countries. CIFOR is one of 15 centres within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

CIFOR communicates globally with many different kinds of people and institutions interested in forests and people who depend on them. CIFOR website is a central pillar in their institutional strategy to disseminate scientific research and related policy information to scientists, junior researchers, policy makers and journalists.

To make Cifor research freely available as international public goods, the website must help to make their findings and publications easily accessible in several languages. The contents they produce include press releases and news stories, policy briefs, scientific research, project reports and corporate information. They also share much of the research programme materials through project specific areas of the website that allow the research teams working in several continents to share what they are doing and learn with donors and the public.

As an international institution with more than 200 employees, consultants and associates, Cifor rely on the website to also communicate with those who work with them, everything from human resource policy, to updates on trips and conferences, to football match schedules at headquarters.  Because many people who work with CIFOR are widely dispersed and frequently work at research sites, Cifor rely on the website to give them access to data and services.

Technology/Tools

• Typo3
• Ajax
• php
• mysql
• jquery, Colorbox

Key Issues

• Technical Challenges
  The scientific publications, researcher profiles, projects etc have to be collected from an external database/web service and displayed in the website. We developed an extension to meet the requirement. The extension collects the data from the web service and displays in the website. The extension also provides option to manage and filter the data from the external databases  within the typo3 backend.
  A single sign on was needed to make the authentication simple and fast. We used an LDAP server and integrated to typo3 for user authentication. So user created from the LDAP server can login to the website.

Final Deployment

The site is hosted in a Windows Web server . We provided support for the Server configuration and installations.

 

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