Dear all,

Thanks for joining us on the hosted portals community call yesterday. Here is a summary of what we discussed:

1. Update on aligning GBIF.org and Hosted Portals 

Reminder on why this work is needed:

· Since the end of last year, Morten and Daniel have been rewriting and repackaging the Hosted Portal (HP) code base to align with the GBIF.org software. This is a significant improvement as it allows us to maintain a single code base going forward, simplifying future updates, and speeding up development.

• We are aiming for consistency in data exploration between GBIF.org and HPs. In future, features can be brought to both GBIF.org and the HPs at the same time.

Current status:

• All hosted portals now have a UAT site (user acceptance test site) that is using the new code base. This is different from your staging site. This UAT site will show you how your HP will look after the migration to the new code.
• If you’re not familiar with your UAT site, you can view it by replacing “something.hp.gbif-staging.org” with “something.hp.gbif-uat.org”. 
• The new code base includes some updated features. For further details, see: https://github.com/gbif/hosted-portals/issues/302
• Work is ongoing on the new GBIF.org site to be based on the same software as HPs. We hope to have demos of this throughout the year (including a possible session at the technical support hour for nodes) and for the new site to be live on https://gbif.org before October 2025. Many of the data search capabilities can already be seen in this hosted portal https://hp-theme.gbif-uat.org/dataset/search which should appear familiar to all. 

Request for help reviewing the site before the migration: 

• Please help in reviewing your UAT site to ensure that nothing has been broken. If you find any issues, please do let Morten know so they can be fixed. 
• We will aim to migrate everyone’s live hosted portal site to the new code in the first week of March 2025. We will of course remain committed to fixing any issues that arise after the migration, too.

2. Translations

• The production, staging, and UAT sites increasingly rely on vocabularies for a growing number of values. This change is unrelated to the new codebase but stems from updates to the processing pipeline. This is important because there is currently no clearly defined process for translating these values. For example, you may notice that Type Status values, such as "Holotype," are currently displayed in English. We are working to migrate existing translations to the vocabularies.
• We will be in touch in the future to explain how you can review and contribute to further translations in the GBIF Vocabulary server.

3. Hosted Portals Communication Campaign

• You have hopefully noticed recent news items and social media posts highlighting HPs. 
• If there are specific dates for which it would be helpful to have your hosted portal in the spotlight, please do reach out to kcopas@gbif.org or communication@gbif.org to let us know.  
• Also, if you have any events coming up during which you could help presenting GBIF’s hosted portal programme, we would be happy to support you with materials (slides, printed materials, etc.).

Thanks again for a nice call!

Best

Mélianie, Morten, Daniel, and Tim

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Dr. Mélianie Raymond
Community and Capacity Manager
GBIF Secretariat
Universitetsparken 15
DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
Tel.: +45 35 32 14 96
E-mail: mraymond@gbif.org
www.gbif.org