pcplantdb

[Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Hi folks,

Good discussion, and thanks Sean. I knew and thought Plants should have 
a reasonable interface to access their information. Now, I wonder if 
they also might provide the plant info in an XML format, not just HTML. 
It would seem likely that they'd provide XML or some other better 
interchange format, CSV or something a bit cleaner.

If we do indeed grab info from other DB's, here's another place where 
"info as comment" would come into play, so we could assign a source to 
it and credit it. You'll notice the Plants DB has an interlinked 
relationship with CalPhoto, and other photo archives, not all the info 
resides on USDA servers, but they know if one of the archives has 
photos of X....it would be great to set up links between DB's like 
this, and move on from there.

Re: blogs...
After checking out CivicSpace (a branch of the Drupal CMS which arose 
out of the Dean campaign) liking it, and seeing that the templating 
system was vastly improved since I last looked, I decided to try 
porting PIW to it.

You can see it here: www.openpermaculture.org/civicspace

Note: design not complete, some layout bugs with the footer, and the 
sidebar should get reworked, but it runs. It would need PHP and a mySQL 
DB.
There are some pretty nice features, blogs, collaborative book writing, 
membership management (remember, it's designed for civic organizations 
and running campaigns), volunteer organization, RSS syndication 
(OpenPermaculture comes to mind), etc.

I think it would be cool to try using it. We'd want to develop a bit of 
a "style guide", not so much in regards to grammar, but what do we want 
the public to see, how do we present ourselves through our posts? I 
wouldn't mind if we posted some of the interesting possibilities of 
where this could go, cool tools that are out there, etc. But we'd 
probably want a category for "dreaming", stuff thats really exciting, 
but, lets not get people thinking the functionality is coming out in 2 
months. Maybe inspire them, and draw in other collaborat[ions | ors ] 
through it though?

OK, 'nough said for now.

Cheers all,
Bear