Plant Parentage?

I was thinking, Dave, (yeah I know it's scary, lol) would it be possible to make a field for parentage for groups like Roses, Daylilies, etc. Maybe it could be put in when the plant is added, and maybe you could make it so that Ubers or people that ask for access to be able to add it, so that no one will write in weird stuff. Eventually you might could write some script to give lineage like HelpMeFind.com does.

-Paul-

Terry?

This would be neat for some tomato hybrids too.

I think it would be great... but I think It'd also be a can of worms. There's enough problems just keeping plant families, genus, and species straight. I think adding parentage might be nightmare. The idea is wonderful though if it could be done without creating a big headache. Maybe if there was just a few knowledgeable people per plant group ... that would have access to the parentage fields.

I'd like to see a comment area that doesn't move with new entries. One that is in the body of the page and gives us some good solid info. Anyone could offer info, but it would be filled in by Admin. (just what you guys want... another job!) Info like habitat, history, origin could be addressed there.

Yes... I know what you mean, Weez. Seems a lot of people have worked hard to add pertinent info and stats to the comment section but it gets burried to the bottom with people relaying they're plant stories.

Maybe a feature to keep one entry at the top of the list???

Yeah, the reason I asked was because I find myself posting comments on almost every rose I add, mostly just to show the parentage. But it would be nice if the parentage could be put in as a field so it would always be apparent.

-Paul-

Yes, Poppysue. That would be good. But, in order not to offend anyone, I think that comment should be a collaborative effort or submitted to admin for review first. We have some wonderful experts out there that can contribute.

Information on a plant can be quite different than comments on our personal experiences with the plants or our queries. Both have value, but, as you say, information gets lost in the volume of submissions.

Bump...

If I'm reading this correctly, the proposal is to add additional field names to the current list of Common, Family, Genus, Species, Cultivar (and synonyms.)

If so, here's my nickel's worth of thought:

We've debated adding fields for hybridizer and year of intro; so far, we've chosen to add them parenthetically to the cultivar name, which seems to work fairly well.

I would be more inclined to add a field for those before I'd add one for parentage - just my personal preference, but based in part on the fact that I think more people would search for a plant by its hybridizer or year it was introduced than by its parentage. Could be wrong though ;o)

Orchid grexes are going to be a problem at some point in the future. They don't fit well in the current field structure we have, and - again, personal preference speaking - I'd prefer that we gave some thought to developing specific fields for that information before we add parentage.

What could be nice is for the PDB admins to be able to change the order in which comments appear, as we can for images. That would allow us to bring forward a particularly helpful descriptive comment and give it "top billing" regardless of whether written by a Uber or other member. (At some point it might be nice to let Ubers re-arrange both images and comments, too - but that's a whole other conversation.)

You're right about putting it in the same list as Common, Family, Genus, Species, Cultivar, but what about putting as a normal field, but making it only editable by the creator of the entry, the admins, maybe the Ubers, and people that ask to have access to the parentage fields.

-Paul-

Paul, that's what I'm leaning toward. If we can encourage some of our more prolific writers to put fingers to keyboard, I'd like to see us be able to highlight their efforts by placing their comments at the top of the list.