Changes to the 'Files

I'm on an iPad (mobile) and don't find it user friendly. I have gotten better at finding stuff but I have the exact name.

We are looking at ways to balance the intro to PF for new users with the need for returning users to be able to get to what they need/want as quickly as possible. That's always been an issue - in the past, we had a LOT of text at the top that explained how wonderfully big and growing PF was :-). Most of us trained our eyes to look past it and the same thing will happen with the new main page, for those of us who use it on a very frequent basis. For those who don't, you have to provide a user-friendly way to ease them into using it.

That said, the browse-by-cultivar is still there. We are continuing to tweak how it works, because there are thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of cultivars to scroll through.

If you scroll down the page a bit you'll see a section called "popular plants" and it has a little tab near the top to pull down and select the type of plant you want to search for. This is what was just an alpha text list on the old home page.

When you select the type of plant you want to search on, it will return all the plants in that section. You can then sort them by cultivar name. The biggest difference (aside from the layout) is that you now see a little more detail about each plant than you did previously (height, zones it grows in, etc.) And yes, we do need to figure out a way to quickly advance to a specific letter of the alphabet (i.e., all the cultivars that begin with the letter "H" or "M" etc.)

You can still search for plants by their hybridizer. In the advanced search you'll find the same function we had previously - plug in just the hybridizer's name, or common name and hybridizer, or genus and hybridizer.

Here are the Irises where we have noted Sass as the hybridizer: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/search/results.php?genus=Iris&hybri=Sass

My comment (from using PF on my cell phone) is when I get to the main search page, the banner which should be a lovely picture is black, or at least dark. The text "Plant files is rhe most complete database" blah blah is on a black background. It feels lik a missed opportunity for a pretty picture or at least a pretty color. It's not so bad on a computer, but on a cell phone, the ENTIRE SCREEN goes black for a second before the text appears and eventually is replaced by an image. Twice I thought something terribly erong had happened to my phone! The third time, I was used to it.

Terry, it is easy to look past still, small black characters on a light background. It is not easy to look past a very large, full-color and detailed slide show. It is not easy to look past the very large icons. The size and shape and detail of some of the icons closely resemble advertisements. It is as if everything is emphasized, instead of having key items emphasized and elaboration on those items in an eyeball-friendly format. I live with ADD, and it is particularly difficult for me to focus on what I come here for. Everything on the page is saying LOOK AT ME!!!!!!! As soon as it loads I want to put my head under a blanket.

I know DG is not alone in adopting such formats. I may have to bow out of the internet community all together until this obnoxious style is phased out. :/

As I mentioned above, I was able to find the way to sort by cultivar. But unless I'm trying to look up Aachen Prince, the results are useless to me. There is no way I can mouse-click 1000 times to get where I need to be.

Can you please tell me the search terms you used to sort by hybridizer? They don't show on the result list.

Can you also please tell me how to stop seeing ads? Baby shoes, grandma's wrinkle cream - I shouldn't have to see these as a paying member. That box is unchecked in my preferences.

also, just a little side note.... on the PF homepage, when you scroll down to the bottom, it says Gardner reviews. shouldn't that be Gardener's Reviews? pretty sad that gardener is misspelled.

Carrie, it doesn't have a black background for me.

It's black. I read your post and thought I must have remembered wrong, why would there be a black background, maybe it's grey or small or only instantaneous. It's a full five seconds of all my attention on a big black box. At 28,000 bps that would have been normal, but not these days.

This one kind of falls in the "you can't please all the people all the time" thing - we know that some people enjoyed the minimalist almost text-only look of the old interface. For others, it was way too many words on the screen and held very little appeal. Some people are more visual than text-oriented.

And you're right in identifying it as a larger societal trend. I'm telling my age, but I started my career in "good old days" of white or green text on a black computer screen. Text-only had its advantages, but technology has made it possible to do far more with graphics, and we continue to evolve and adapt in that direction...I guess because we can. And honestly, it is prettier than those old CRT monitors :-).



Your point is well-taken and we will look at ways to make it easier/faster to skim through the cultivar list.



I used the Advanced Search and put Iris in the genus field and Sass in the hybridizer field. I could have probably skipped putting anything in the genus field, since I don't think Sass hybridized any other plants.



Your ads were enabled, and I've turned them off. You shouldn't be seeing any ads now.

Good eye - and yes, we've asked the techs to get it changed ASAP.

It has colorful pics of plants on my end. That's weird!

It's so difficult to do a simple task such as looking up for a plant, bug or bird. A fellow DG friend suggested that I add some photos of butterflies into the bug files. I can't no longer find it if I type ' Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly ' what gives?

After that 5 seconds of black, it was pretty flower pictures. But I think 5 seconds of black is unnecessary.

Ah, please disregard my comments above. I found it now.

I'm glad you did - because that part really hasn't changed in terms of difficulty. (I don't think, anyway!)

If not, please don't make it any more complicated modification to other files. I pretty discouraged trying to find plants on PF these past week.

Okay, I did not find the 'hybridizer' field initially because it's under the "family" heading. :/

I used to manage a DOS-based DB, not as long ago as one might think. The kind with the dark blue screen/light blue text. Vintage 1983. It was so easy to search, to maintain, and to fix errors. When they scrapped that for a modern DB system, I had to leave the job. All the clicks and drop-downs sucked the life right out of me!

As for the ads, I had checked the box that says to allow ads from select Garden Watchdog members, which I would like. Why was it showing other non-GW ads? Is it not an actual option?

I'm sorry - but I promise the modifications we've made actually do make it easier in many ways to find things. It may not seem that way to those who were very familiar with the old layout, but for new(er) users, it's designed to be more intuitive :-).

I'm not sure why it still says "family" - that's not supposed to be its heading.

As for ads, I suspect something broke somewhere along the way, and the choice to see ads from GWD companies morphed into seeing more general ads.

I really don't see how anyone could think these "modifications" could make searching easier when the search cant be narrowed down. Its great if everything you are looking for starts with "A".

You are correct that currently the browse-by-name isn't easier. And we will continue to work on making that function better.

However, the ability to search for a plant by all or part of its name AND limit your results for certain characteristics (height, zone, bloom color, etc.) is a huge step in the right direction, and something we never quite got our arms around in the past.

Maybe if you could do a general search and then have options for height, zone, and etc. it would make the search function more user friendly. Personally, I use the PF to see how the plant actually looks when full grown or to see its blooms rather than the other features.

For example, you could search for Salvia. On the next search result page, offer the options to narrow the search, or just search through the bazillion options that come up.

You can do that. You can use the general search without specifying any details to screen the results. If the results are too numerous, you can hit your browser's back arrow and add some filters.

See, that's not what I'm talking about. It's frustrating to have to hit my back button and then narrow my search. If it was truly user friendly, I'd be able to narrow my search on any page. Kind of like on Amazon.

Haahahaha, we all want DG to search like Amazon or Google, two of the hugest companies in the world!

Google is great at searching. Then again, that's their reason for existence (and to pair you up with advertisers, based on your search terms :-).

They don't create content, they don't have to worry about how to organize it or store it. Their only focus is to build the best search engine they can. Our focus is not that narrowly defined.

Something is badly wrong with searching in BugFiles. Using the search I cannot find anything, For example, trying to find the moth Halone sejuncta, I tried in succession
Halone sejuncta
Halone
sejuncta
Variable Halone
Variable
Arctiidae
Lepidoptera
for each of these it replies No Results Found!
The only way I can find it is by going to more options, then enter the specific details, first selecting Order Lepidoptera, then selecting Family Arctiidae, then selecting Genus Halone and then selecting Species halone. and this is made harder because the drop down lists are not in alphabetical order and there is a very long list of families (in the Lepidoptera) to scan through to find the family you want. I eventually found it here:
http://davesgarden.com/guides/bf/go/5489

- Real big boo-boo is the loss of an assumed wildcard search. The old search would assume a Wild Card at the end of what you type; so for example, if you are searching for a name like Cleistocactus something that you just knew started with samai, but couldn't remember how to spell the rest, you could just type in "samai" in the species field and it would pull up any entry that had at least those 5 letters...so, in this specific case would pull up Cleistocactus samaipatanus. Now, it would say "Sorry - not found" because it is looking for a species name of exactly "Cleistocactus samai"! I tried as asterisk, which is often used as a wild card, but that doesn't work either. Major loss of functionality there...especially with the difficulty with spelling many latin names....if you can get close, DG search was always there to help.

It would make it A LOT easier to swallow if we could get that Wild Card search available again.

Good point. You should have been able to find it on the first stab (Halone sejuncta), and the second one - Halone. I'll let them know.

Yes, all the 'Files searches should allow partial word searches. I'll add that to the list of things to have the techs fix.

I'm not sure that this has to do with the PlantFiles specifically, but when I view the posts I have made to the PlantFiles, I see there are three pages of hits. However, page 1, 2 and 3 are all the same. It doesn't advance to the rest.

This has also happened to me. I was searching for an older thread on the irises forum where I listed a lot of pictures that I had taken at the western KY Botanical Gardens. I was trying to find the thread and it wouldn't advance past the first couple of pages. Is it broken or no longer a feature? The iris pictures I wanted to search for in my thread were of Belvi Queen and Rodeo Clown.

A few suggestions-
1- The Advanced Search option is sort of buried in the fine print-off to the side, tiny letters among other options. People do not notice this. It should be bigger and more obvious.
2- Once in the Advanced search option, I bet you a zillion $$$ part of the reason people are struggling is the boxed options are IN THE WRONG ORDER! A hundred years of science has us all trained to order things Family-Genus-species-cultivar, but in this new search function they are out of order, also since it is in two side by side lists people might not even notice the cultivar and species boxes at all. Once they find it, they will mistakenly put the species name in the wrong box. A recipe for frustration.

This is an older problem that I think/hope we'll get addressed in this series of changes and updates.

Your point is very well taken, and we've asked the techs to re-order the boxes in the proper order.

I'm not sure we can or will make the advanced search more prominent, as it's not used as much as the more general search. (Those who use it are "power users" who know how to parse out plant names - and that's definitely not the majority of those who visit PlantFiles.)

"Power users" UNITE!

I like the attribution. I also would like the Advanced Search made more prominent, since it is the quickest way to get to the entries that I'd like to add content to - like images, comments, zip codes, etc.

It would be awesome as a tab/block choice on the home page...

IMHO the ways to search are all over the place with no logical placing. There are more pictures and graphics but the search options are all over.

Latin Look-up is also a way to get to where you need to be quicker. i have the advanced search and the latin look-up bookmarked and don't even bother with the PF "home page".
a power user WILL find a way! LOL

Here, here!! Power Users all the way!

Never used the generic/standard search...never gets me to a specific level. An option to define which search is the default by user would be great. That way, if you ARE a Power User, you get the search you want.

Hi Terry,

Even with all the PlantFiles problems, I still really enjoy using the "Advanced Search". I don't just use it to find a particular plant, but also to find types of plants...deer resistant, bloom color, particular heights or bloom times, etc.

Is it possible to add filters for Annual, Tender Perennial and Perennial? For instance, sometimes I may be trying to get ideas for only annuals (or an annual in my Zone 5), but I have to cull through a ton of pages reading whether the plant is an annual, perennial or another type. I can cull out trees or ground covers by choosing a height, but that's as close as I can get.

I considered adding a very warm zone (like 9), but the only way I can do that is clicking on "Growth Conditions" which gets rid of all the other filters. Another possible option could be adding a filter for Planting Zones to the "Characteristics".

I have to believe it could be helpful to other members as well.

I have no problems with constructive changes. The search option is my main reason for my paid subscription.
At this time I have to reconsider my paid subscription for next year.
I shouldn't have to google something after a time of search frustration because I can't get this website to do it properly the 1st...2nd...3rd frustrating time.
If the techs were IT people first and 2nd also GARDENERS...we wouldn't have all these issues. They would know what they wanted in a useful search and thus know what we want!