GFAR and “MIS”: coherently managing information on organizations, projects and experts

In the context of the process towards coherence in agricultural information systems and in coordination with the Content Management Taskforce set in place by the Expert Consultation on International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology (Rome, 2005), GFAR, in collaboration with partner organizations, particularly FAO and Wageningen International, is focusing its attention on activities and projects aiming at building coherent and integrated Management Information Systems (MIS).
Management Information Systems (MIS) provide information on objects related to the management of activities and projects in ARD: organizations, experts, projects and project outputs. A need for such comprehensive and structured information services has clearly emerged in recent years.

Drupal CMS

Drupal (www.drupal.org) is a CMS written in PHP.
Drupal is quite reliable and you can have a website running in a very few moves even if you don’t know PHP.

There are only a few themes (graphic templates) available and they are all very similar, but you can write your own template in PHP once you understand how to do it (basically, you copy one of the core themes and change it as you like it). And there are a lot of modules available for download from the Drupal website, which allow you to do a lot of interesting things without programming (like aggregating RSS news from other websites, creating a calendar of events etc.).

Infoglue CMS

InfoGlue (www.infoglue.org) is a CMS written in Java.
InfoGlue is the CMS used for EGFAR.

The strong points of InfoGlue are: its reliability, its very good Model-View-Controller (MVC) model implementation, its in-built support for categorisation, its ability to create infinite content types, the very granular management of users and permissions, the powerful API and custom JSP tags which make it more a framework than a simple CMS and the ease of use once the system has been set up.