How anybody can even think about running a website without using something like Google Analytics is beyond me. I’ve just done an update (last friday) of our species descriptions and am now tracking views of all pages thanks to this amazing facility. It’s really gratifying to see that we’re being usedby all sorts of people, all over the place.
I’ve been using the famous BPH-2: Periodicals with Botanical Content to standardise journal names in GrassBase, and I have endless frustration with the fact that this work is a standard for TDWG but it is not available electronically. If the standard hopes to be useful towards projects like the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopaedia of Life, then it should also be freely available to all the peoples of the world, not just the relatively few specialist botanical libraries that have the money to pay for it. It’s published in 2004, so the text must have been electronic at some point in its lifetime, so even if you didn’t use a database when writing it, it would be a lot easier to search if it were electronic (even a PDF would be great). And please use a Creative Commons licence 
Plus if you do it you’ll get lots of Kudos. And a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Oh and you may well get cited a lot more.
Compiled by Gavin D. R. Bridson. 2004. 2 volumes. v–xx, 1,470 pp.; 8 1/2 x 11″; 10 lbs. Cloth bound, $130 plus insurance ($3.20 domestic; $3.40 international) and shipping and handling. ISBN 0-913196-78-9.
BPH-2, a second edition of Botanico-Periodicum-Huntianum (1968), is an alphabetical title list of periodicals with botanical content. Spanning 1665 to 2002, BPH-2 includes more than 33,000 titles from around the
Note to self:
getImage(params)
getMetadata(params)
getImageSearch(params)
FNA VOLS. 24 and 25 and more
This General Bibliography started as a compilation of all the citations in the “Selected References” portions of the grass volumes in the Flora of North America north of Mexico series. We are continuing to add references to it since the FNA 24 was sent to publication with the thought that it may benefit those starting to work on a group. Because of its history, the references are heavily biassed towards references on North American taxa.
NBII Digital Image Library – Grasses has a library of freely available public domain images of biodiversity – not many grasses by lots of trees.
The World Grass Species database has been updated with a number of very important changes. With this new name we hope to become a central resource for Agrostologists worldwide.
The database has been christened GrassBase following the trend of a number of other web projects.
Just over 150 new descriptions have been incorporated into the database, including their associated nomenclature (which can be found in the updated synonymy database). This brings our total number of species with descriptions to 10,982. If you feel we are missing any data please don’t hesitate to inform us. If you have an earlier version of the nomenclature database please download it again as the links will be out of date.
We have finally updated our search page and it is now much faster. In addition you can add GrassBase to your personal Google Homepage to quickly search our data.
We have successfully generated descriptions for all grass genera from our species descriptions using Delta’s built in abilities to summarise individual taxon descriptions.
Each description page (species and genera) has been enhanced with the provisions of links that will search a number of different internet resources, including searching for specimens on Kew’s Herbarium Catalogue and electronic Plant Information Centre or ePIC. Many of the specimens within the Herbarium Catalogue are type specimens and have been scanned at high resolution which will help with your identification process. Additional links are also provided to GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) , w3 TROPICOS and Google. These links will help to streamline your data gathering process, giving you more time to focus on what’s important to you.
Zen theme intends to be a good starting point for a custom CSS theme
Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal 5. If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine.
The idea behind the Zen theme is to have a very flexible standards-compliant and (relatively) semantically correct XHTML theme that can be highly modified through CSS.
Out of the box, Zen is clean and simple with a provided fixed-width subtheme called Zen-fixed.
The name is an homage to the CSS Zen Garden site where designers can redesign the page purely through the use of CSS.
This theme has been written for Drupal 5 and there is (currently) no version for 4.7
I wonder if there is a Drupal module which can use PlotKit- nice streamlined web2.0 graphs. There is a test graph at http://media.liquidx.net/js/plotkit-tests/dynamic.html.
Other nifty things that can be done with data sources like Edit Grid or Google Spreadsheets that Rod Page has advocated using for collaborative data matrices. They have a demo of this in action at http://imagine-it.org/google/spreadsheets/makechart.htm
Option for image management using well supported open source tool gallery
This module embeds Gallery2 (http://gallery.menalto.com) inside your drupal installation to support photos, videos and other content. There is support for 2 types of image block (can be placed in the sidebar) and a navigation menu, inserting of images into nodes via an input filter, TinyMCE support, syncing of users between the 2 applications, …
Note that you will need to download and install Gallery2 (http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/Gallery2:Download) prior to installing this module.
You can see the module in action on Gallery’s own website at: http://gallery.menalto.com/gallery
Please post any issues, support requests, feature requests etc in either Drupal 4.7 GalleryEmbedded Forum or Gallery module issues tracker only, rather than in other Drupal or Gallery2 forums.
Probably useful to implement a static ‘homepage’ – may be able to do this through Drupal core though? mush check this out.
The Front Page module allows user to specify splash pages or front pages to their site that are different in layout to the default theme/style and also offers the option to display different front pages to Authenticated Users logged in and Anonymous users not logged in. It is very simple to install, no SQL fiddling required and step by step instructions are provided in the README.TXT file in the download.
key features
The front_page.module is very useful if you want to do the following:
* Have a splash front page to your drupal site that is different from your default layout you can have a full HTML/Flash/PHP splash page that points to a different stylesheet/layout from the default theme you are using. Or you can simply display a special message within your default theme.
* Automatically display a different front page for Anonymous and Authenticated Users. You can specify a special front page for visitors to your site who have not logged in or registered, while users who have already registered (Authenticated Users) automatically either get a different page or are redirected to a specific area/section/page within your site.)
* Easily update/change the contents or the redirects of your front page(s) from within the Drupal Administration area. The Front Page module, once installed, is easily accessible from the Drupal Administration Module Settings page, so you can update and modify your Front Page(s) very simply and easily. Some find it useful to simply alternate between UNDER MAINTENANCE/BACKUP in PROCESS type notices for users and their normal front pages.
* Include PHP code in your Front Page(s) (Thanks Scott for the patch!) Create dynamic and more sophisticated front pages to your site using PHP. Click through to the Sliced Bread PHP Snippets handbook page for some ready made snippets you can paste/tweak for your front page(s).
* Override the HOME links on your site Useful if you have a SPLASH page or FLASH intro to your site that you don’t want users going back to each time they click on your HOME link or the HOME breadcrumb links throughout your site. The front_page.module can tell whether the person is coming from within the site or from elswhere. So visitors and users are handled accordingly.key features (Drupal 5 version of the module only)
* Specify a different front page based on Role. You can specify a special front page for each role type
* Display a custom mission statement for registered users who have not visited the site for a while You can specify the special mission and the ‘time away’ setting.
useful for grouping fields such as nomenclature (lists of synonyms, basionym, accepted name etc), specimens {kew; gbif; etc;}
This module allows you to create field groups for CCK fields. So you can
group your CCK node forms with the help of field groups.
Field groups can be set to be collapsible and can have descriptions.This module has been incorporated into the Content Construction Kit (CCK). Use a development snapshot of it and fieldgroup will be included!
Also submit any issues into the cck issue queue!
Exif | drupal.org
Useful for extracting metadata from images served by GrassBase
The Exif module allows to display Exif metadata on image nodes. Exif is a specification for the image file format used by digital cameras.
Administrators can choose what Exif tags they want to display, and control the order of appearance.
At this time, this module supports Exif information only with JPEG files.
This module targets Drupal 5.0 and requires the PHP Exif Library (PEL). Note that PEL requires PHP 5.
DHTML Menu | drupal.org
Possibility of using for GrassBase navigation menu.
DHTML menus uses javascript DHTML to reduce the number of page loads when using nested menus; this is particularly useful with Drupal’s administration system.
Ordinarily in Drupal, when you click on a menu with sub-items, you need to go to that page and do a page refresh to get the items that are beneath it. With DHTML Menus, instead the sub-items are expanded as soon as you click on it. Additionally, it uses a cookie to remember what menus are open and what menus are closed, so as you navigate around the site your menus remain consistent.
Content Construction Kit (CCK) | drupal.org
Useful to build custom nodes for GrassBase.
The Content Construction Kit allows you create content types through the web. A content type is a collection of fields.
The intent of the CCK is to make the creation of custom node types easier.
Several contributed projects provide additional field types and widgets for CCK:
* computed field: lets you add a PHP-driven “computed field” to CCK node types
* date: creates an ISO or unix timestamp date field
* email: validated email field
* image field: an image field
* link: a URL fieldOther modules related to CCK:
* content template (contemplate): allows for control over the form and display of fields, including teaser and RSS feeds
* views: provides many types of listings of content; CCK exposes its fields to the Views system.
Computed Field | drupal.org
Use this to create full scientific citation including authority for plant names.(But see Automatic Node Titles)
Computed Field is a cck module which lets you add a computed field to custom content types. You can choose whether to store your computed field in the database. You can also choose whether to display the field, and how to format it. The value of the field is set using php code, so it can draw on anything available to drupal, including other fields, the current user, database tables, etc. The drawback of this is of course that you need to know some php to use it.
Computed Field requires the content module (cck).
I have added a Google custom search engine to grassbase and this makes things a lot easier for me to deal with.
you can add the search engine to your custom google homepage by clicking on the button below:
You can also use the search engine at the it’s website
