With more than 500 million records documenting species occurrences shared and accessible through GBIF.org, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a major actor in biodiversity data discovery. The launch of the new GBIF website in November 2013 saw an improvement in the reliability, access and fitness for use of the published data.

With this amount of data, it is not possible to offer as much detail as in national portals, especially in terms of map visualization, field search, data quality, etc.  To provide a suitable framework for national needs, Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and GBIF worked together and created a technical community around the portal developed by ALA.

During different workshops, the ALA team described their tools and trained the participants to install and make the first steps, such as internationalization, changing the design and branding of the interface. There are different tools to help the participants during the installation, such as a wiki and a mailing list. Moreover, developers can also contribute to the ALA portal by developing new features and share them with the community. For now, the ALA team has created generic modules for the occurrences search engine and the metadata registry, with other modules available for installation through specific scripts.

GBIF France launched its new portal based on ALA modules at the end of May 2015. We have been able to match this generic infrastructure to our local needs and requests, developing our own design by adding the portal to our national website and translating the ALA portal into French.

In this presentation we will summarize the functionalities offered in the new GBIF France website and share our positive experience and lessons learned through the process of customizing the ALA software.