The European Community Clearing-House Mechanism Portal Toolkit (EC CHM PTK) was developed by packaging the functions of the EC CHM Portal (http://biodiversity-chm.eea.eu.int/) for use by the interested member states. The EC CHM also makes available its Toolkit to interested Parties and Governments.

The Toolkit offers following functions:

• A hierarchical directory of articles, documents, links, images, audio and video components;
• Full content management functions accessible by authenticated users via user-friendly web pages (submit/publish/edit/delete/copy/move different types of information);
• Above workflow entirely supervised by the Webmaster team;
• A search function;
• The ability to compile news and events syndicated news via Rich Site Summary (RSS) from collaborating sites (see: http://www.eionet.eu.int/EIONET_Tech/RSS);
• Export of website content in XML format;
• Support for meetings and event management and an Events calendar;
• Helpdesk ticketing system available for end users;
• Documentation on the activities of the EC CHM.

The EC CHM PTK has been developed in Zope (http://www.zope.com), a high-performance application server, a web server and a content management system. Zope is based on Python, which makes it compatible with most of the operating systems used today.

The Toolkit is open source and can be obtained from the European Environment Agency free of charge. Zope can be obtained from http://www.zope.org free of charge.

The EC CHM is developed by the European Environment Agency (EEA) for the European Commission under the IDA Programme (Interchange of Data among Administrations) with the consultant company Finsiel.

For more information, please contact:
Ms Ulla Pinborg
Project Manager for Biodiversity
European Environment Agency
Kongens Nytorv 6, DK 1050 Copenhagen
Denmark
Email: mailto:ulla.pinborg@eea.eu.int