Permaculture Database

[Rich Morris <mailinglists@pfaf.org>]

To show what can be done with a wiki I've now got a wiki with the pfaf 
database in it at
        http://www.pfaf.org/wiki/index.php

I've added some extensions to media wiki to make it easier to use more 
semantic style elements

A typical page is
http://www.pfaf.org/wiki/index.php/Cichorium_intybus

Points to note:

The basic botanical info about a plant is displayed in standard format
this is achieved by using the template mechanism, basically a form of 
macro inclusion.

{{Disp:Plant heading
|author={{author|L.}}
|common names={{common name|Chicory}}
|family={{family|Compositae}}
|....
}}

This sort of mechanism could be used to establish a look and feel for 
the pages.

The templates are use in a second way
{{family|Compositae}}
sets the family of the plant. This puts the plant in the category of 
plants in the Compositae family.
http://www.pfaf.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Family:Compositae

there are similar templates for the author, genus, Common name, Habit, 
Habitat, Height, Width, Range and Use. Theres also an extensible mechanism
{{prop|Hardyness|3}}
which allows any other property of the plant to be defined.

The second feature of these templates is that it stores the data in a
'propetries' table. This table can be queried to find plants with a 
given property and also to return a specific property of a plant.
The full list of properties for a plant can be output in xml, see for 
example
http://www.pfaf.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Properties/Cichorium_intybus
(note due to the way the data was imported this table has not been 
populated fully yet).

Feel free to mess about.

        Rich

--
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