1 Reply by Jim Bacon (edited by Jim Bacon 23-11-2009 17:51:50)

  • Jim Bacon
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Re: Drupal/Indicia integration

I was thinking through what I might do for Indicia/Drupal integration following our talks at the NBN conference.

I had to clarify in my mind the distinction between information stored in Drupal and information stored in the Indicia warehouse.

My current thinking goes like this:

Online recording, occurrence-type data is stored in Indicia and we can build Drupal modules which display pages that access the Indicia warehouse. John van Breda has already built a module for data input. I am likely to build one for data verification from photos linked to an occurrence. Another obvious one is for reporting data, such as Records I Have Entered. I am thinking we create modules for forms that show information in a standard structure but which can be themed to alter their appearance. Perhaps they would just consist of one website page per module with controls that use AJAX to update the page with user selections.

Other data such as species accounts, like Stuart Ball demonstrated (more details) to some of us at the Thursday meeting, are stored in Drupal. Where there is a content type being defined and there are going to be many similar pages, perhaps we can create modules for custom CCK fields. One example of this would be an NBN distribution map. Another might be Your Indicia Records For This Species.

I have been wondering if one could create custom fields for CCK for Indicia input so that any shape and size of input form could be configured without programming but this may be wrong thinking to use CCK to construct a form rather a node type. I rather think it is.

Any way, if anyone has a view on the above or is going to start building Drupal modules it would be good to share that information here so that we can work together.

Jim Bacon

2 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
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Re: Drupal/Indicia integration

Jim,

I can't comment on the above as I've not started to use Drupal, but I thought I'd mention that I am about to start work on a website that I intend to build using Drupal. It'll be a learning experience for me as much as anything (I always find the best way to learn something is to try it out in anger). I also intend to try an integrate Indicia. I'd be willing to play around with anything you come up with and feed back is that would be useful to you?

Charles

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

charlesroper's Website

3 Reply by Alan Hale

  • Alan Hale
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Re: Drupal/Indicia integration

Jim

Just to register that I'm very excited by the potential here, and that I have experience of building Drupal sites - not yet modules, but I'd be interested in branching out into this area. So, if I can help in any way, I'd be happy to.

In the meantime I'll try and give some thought to the issues you've raised here when I'm more familiar with Indicia (which I've only just started looking into).

Best wishes

Alan

Alan Hale
Aberystwyth

Alan Hale's Website

4 Reply by johnvanbreda

  • johnvanbreda
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Re: Drupal/Indicia integration

Hi Jim,

I've spent a bit of time thinking about these very issues, because it seems the kind of integration between Drupal, Indicia etc is going to be quite commonplace. So here are my thoughts so far.

Firstly, some overlap between data in Drupal and Indicia is almost inevitable. In an ideal world I guess we'd put everything into the Drupal database so there is no need for overlap, but this would leave us with problems a) because MySQL doesn't do spatial data as well as PostGIS, and b) because not all Indicia users will want to install Drupal - one of the nice things about Indicia is the ability to just drop a few lines of PHP code into an existing web site.

So, Drupal is getting lots of interest as a tool for building species pages, from Stuart's demo last week right through to Scratchpads and the Encyclopedia of life. Indicia needs to hold species "terms" but really only as a lookup for auto-complete controls etc. So my feeling is that we should stick with this and use CCK or the Taxonomy Terms modules to build the species account data up using a module based on the Species Profile Model. We also ought to keep an eye on the Drupal Bioinformatics Group to see if there are any standardised ways of doing this.

With the species pages in Drupal, all linked to the Taxonomy module, it should be easy to borrow from Scratchpads and write modules as required to build a fairly nice species taxonomy browser. In which case it will be very handy to have an Indicia -> Drupal Taxonomy synchronisation tool, which means you can then enter and view Indicia occurrence data against these pages. The other synchronisation tool that might be handy would be Drupal species profiles -> Recorder Taxon Dictionary or Thesaurus.

We can build all the Indicia pages you mention (maps, your records etc) using the existing Indicia Drupal forms module. But I don't think CCK for Indicia forms is the right way to go, as I imagine extending CCK to support all the specialised controls (e.g. Flickr integration) is not going to be as simple as just writing PHP, and you will be expected to put the data straight into MySQL. Though I do have ideas in my head to make it even easier to build Indicia forms (by auto-generating the code on the Warehouse server for a given survey setup) so you wouldn't need CCK. That's one for another day!

Best Wishes

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

johnvanbreda's Website