Google Maps in Drupal for specimens

Thanks to Vince for his recent post on Google Maps Mashups. Does enabling cache speed up page loading for this? Or is it the javascript? – I had that problem when trying to overlay shapefiles onto google maps. The “proper” way to do this is to have a map server only serving up the points that are visible from a particular zoom and doing the clustering itself (and drupal doesn’t have this – yet).

Good to see CCK being useful. I read yesterday that Drupal 6 is going to have a proper database API which will perform all of the CRUD actions for you. This is going to be called the Schema API. Should be extremely useful for doing DB related stuff (you don’t have to type CREATE TABLE bunkum;
INSERT INTO bunkum;..... – you just tell your schema to add a record or data type or data structure.

Biological Taxonomy in Drupal by Vince Smith

Vince Smith’s post on Biological Taxonomy in Drupal is an interesting read. He has developed a nifty little tool that will help people using his ‘Scratchpads‘, or actually pretty much any Vanilla Drupal installation to import their classifications.

I think this is a great approach as Drupal takes it’s core concept of taxonomy from a biological background. A slightly different way of doing this that I have been thinking about is using Drupal’s Content Construction Kit (CCK) modules to model biological data types such as Taxon Concepts, meaning that metadata about names can be included. There is another drop in replacement for the drupal taxonomy module called Category which has a number of nifty additional features including the ability for drupal node to become a category:

ie:

1. Create your taxon concepts in CCK
2. Make the TaxonConcept node type a Category
3. Tag all your other information relating to that Taxon with that Category

Time I started sharing my ideas I’ve been developing some of these ideas.

Also I was reading about the Relationship Module and it’s possible for node relations to be expressed in RDF and to plug additional RDF ontologies into drupal. All sounds promising and even a little bit TDWG’y

Hope this makes sense.

How-to: Import data into CCK nodes (5.x) | drupal.org

How-to: Import data into CCK nodes (5.x) | drupal.org
How-to: Import data into CCK nodes (5.x)
Drupal 5.x

How-to: Import data into CCK nodes

Do you have data that you want to import into your drupal database, such that each row of data becomes a new node? Then this post may be for you. This originally stemmed from a comment in the forums importing data into CCK created node

There are two issues addressed by this post

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site, Part 1: Introduction and overview

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site provides a good overview as to the reasons why using an OS CMS to implement a web application (and why to use Drupal).

Drupal and the New Paradigm for Content Management | The Couch Kamote Reviews

Drupal and the New Paradigm for Content Management
Drupal uses taxonomy to organise content and this paper discusses why it surpasses other CMS’s. It shows that we need to use a different perspective when managing content, rather than separating content style (the old paradigm), content needs to be central to the management process.

I. Is Drupal similar to other CMS?

1. Giving a point by point comparison of Drupal and traditional content management systems (CMS) like PHPNuke, PostNuke or XOOPs is a tricky and difficult undertaking because of two reasons: First, a comparative matrix of features will not accurately tell the tale. Second, Drupal’s impact is more on the back-end and can only be fully appreciated by web programmers/developers. Both of these reasons are explained further in th…

Sympal Theme | drupal.org

Sympal Theme could serve as the basis of a CSS theme for grassbase

A base theme. A framework for CSS themes. A theme developers theme.

If you have been following some of the recent CSS and webdesign trends, you might have noticed the trend slowly bending towards semantic correct designs. As it should have been from the start.
This means that you don’t just design a site, but really build it. Starting with a good blueprint, which results in a good foundation.

Such a foundation must be semantically best. This way we fulfil four mayor requirements, for free:

* fully SEO supporting
* accessible on mobile devices
* highlight the content, content comes first
* use very consistent XHTML, CLASSnames and IDnames

In fact we want to use three buzzwords:

* Source order
* Tableless
* What’s in a name