The Plants Database goes Live!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh man I can't believe I'm finally launching this thing. I thought it would never get done.

Yet, here I am, typing out the message that announces its existance to the world! I have tried to incorporate all the ideas from all contributors.

It allows photos (multiple photos, with captions per photo) to be uploaded, and lets people know who uploaded what picture.

Also, members can add any plant they want, and can add sections to any plant in the database. I have 3 default section-types to choose from, so as people think of new section-types they'd like added to the plants, please let me know and I'll add them.

Please check it out and start adding plants (pictures please!!). I truly believe that within a month or so, we should have a really nice photo album/plants database guide for gardeners across the world!!

As always, standard disclaimer applies here: this is the initial announcement, and while I've tested it a lot here, there are surely still some bugs and enhancements that will need fixing. Please let me know any oddities that you find right away so I can fix them!!!

You'll find the plants database right here. You will also see it in the menu above - it's called "Plants".

Have fun - I'm so excited!

Dave

p.s. I added Crepe Myrtle to the database already, to give everyone a feel for how a started plant entry might look.

Dave,
This will be great! I can't wait to start playing with it. I probably won't get a chance to until tomorrow ~ I'll be busy with holloween tonight and then I'm off to work. You've done a great job! It looks like it will be a breeze to use too. Thanks for all your hard work!

I made a mistake and can't edit the page now.

I'm heading out to the beach to take pictures of sand for love-lies-bleeding seeds! LOL

What kind of editing do you need to do?

If you want to edit a section (like the General Description) you should be (as the author) given a link to edit the section.

If you actually want to edit the common name/latin name/family name, then I haven't written the code to edit that just yet.

Is that what you meant? If yes - I still have to do that. If not - please clarify.

Dave

I hit on edit and made my changes. When I submitted, it came back as first copy, which was really bad.

I see. I'll get this fixed this morning.
Dave

Sorry about this error. It was an obvious one that I should have caught before. Anyway, it is now fixed.

You can edit them.

I am also considering adding a vehicle for people to edit the caption on photos, as well as the original creator of a plant entry to be able to edit the name/latin/family. Do you think this is a good idea, or will it be too confusing if we start adding too many options?

Dave

It would be nice to change the name/latin/family. I was putting my Red hopi Dye amaranth into the database and realized as I read up on it that it is not love-lies-bleeding, but a princes feather (I believe- have it at home) which makes a difference because it is no longer amaranthus caudatus. So to sum up my long sentence, yes this would be good.

Will add it.

DAve

Alright - I added it in. Please use it sparingly. This updates your live entry as soon as you click submit, so make sure you're happy with what you typed before you click 'submit'.

You'll find the edit option at the top of the main page for that item. Let me know if this doesn't fix the problem.

Dave

Thanks! I am going to write everything down before I put anything in database from now on. I will use it very sparingly. Thanks a bunch!

Now let's populate that database!! My biggest problem is that I know a lot about various plants, but I have almost no pictures!

Here's an important thing to note: you can add pictures to a plant that somebody else has created. So, I can go to gardener_mick's Love-Lies-Bleeding and upload one of my own pictures. Credit will be given to me for all the pictures I upload.

This way, I'd like to end up with lots and lots of pictures for each plant.

Additionally, you can add sections of content to other people's plant entries. So if gardener_mick makes a section about starting the seeds, and if I think I have more information that she left out, I can also add a section on starting seeds. This way the information gets more fleshed out and the reader is given more (rather than less) information.

So everyone knows the rules - let's play! :)

Dave

Wow, I'm gone for 2 days and look at all the new and exciting things here at Daves. New zone feature, plant data base, WooHoo!!! Thanks Dave for all of your efforts and hard work, I too will start contributing to the data base soon.
Jody

Hi Dave,
I'm loving the plant data base, as you can see I've added several plants, at least the general information. I'm wondering what you think about the different species within a genus though. Most genus have quite a few species..should we add each species as a plant or design the data base to include several species for the genus... something for you to consider maybe.
For example the genus kniphofia (red hot pokers) has species names of atlanta, caulescens, ensiflia, cobra and others... Should each one be listed separate? or...what are your thoughts. It wouldn't be a big deal except that most species have different cultivation habits, even if slightly different, and of course different appearance and hardiness.
Just 'food for thought'
Jody

Wow, this is a toughy for me. My ignorance on official plant names is showing here. :( My expertise is computers, my passion (and hopefully future expertise) is gardening.

Please tell me: what are the classifications that a plant may fall under? I'd like the plants database to be as comprehensive as possible, but the main goal is to provide something for the gardener to learn more about potential plants to add to their garden.

It's a balancing act. Once we get the data in the database, we'll be able to make it extremely friendly by allowing people to search by common/latin/family/genus whatever.

Anyway... what's the types of classes that a plant can fall under? Right now I have common name/latin name/family name/category (perennial, annual, etc). What is missing?

Dave

Dave & Jody – I think that it should be listed by plant species & it should be kept fairly simple … so the average gardener will understand. There's definitely a big difference between some of the species with in a genus ~ such as the poppy (papaver) :-) Don’t you think it would be too general just to have the genus? After all there’s annual, perennial, and biennial types of poppies. Just the major “garden worthy” species would be enough to satisfy most gardeners. BTW Jody ~ Bravo! You're doing a great job!

BTW can we use info from other sites here, such as soil, propagation, etc on a plant from another source (botany.com).

I agree with poppysue as to listing each species individually, in my mind I was thinking of clicking on the genus then being able to select the species...but I guess it could be added together in the latin name like most of them have been so far.

Dave just for your info plants follow the following:
Kindom
Phyla
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

The last two being the most important unless your a botonist, horticulturist or along those lines. :)

If we list the species with the genus in the genus column(latin name), how will it effct the search? I think good...all plants in that genus will show up and people will be able to scroll through the different species. And people will probably be more likely to find what they are looking for, less room for typo errors etc...

Ok, if I've lost everyone here with my thoughts...lol. I guess no changes are needed except in the way I enter plants. Some of the ones I entered simply have the genus and I said how many different species were in the genus in the description, I will fix em up. :)

Hmm. I have absolutely no problem making modifications to the database. This was kinda expected when I first created it, since I figured people would start uncovering stuff like this after a while.

Should we change it? In the long-term, will we be better off? I'm starting to believe that yes, we should.

We want it to be very organized, to make it easy for both us and the gardeners who will be relying on the information.

I definitely want the database to be as correct as possible, and if making some changes now is the right way to go - let's do it. We're still fairly young in the project, so changes won't affect us as much.

Making changes is extremely easy on my part - at least this early on anyway. What should I do? Jody, poppysue, I'm looking in your direction for direction in this matter. :)

Dave

Tim,

We shouldn't use copyrighted information from anyone else's site. The last thing I want is to have a problem with the database because of copyrighted information.

What I understand of copyright law, however, (I used to be a journalist a while back) is that you cannot copy verbatim from another person's work. However, you can get facts and information and recompile it into your own words. That's an okay and acceptable practice in journalism (where I came from).

In other cases, the author of the work might give conditions on use of their work. These conditions must be followed (check out the zone map to see how I complied with the USDA's restrictions) and would have to be worked out before used. I would cooperate with you if you found anything that you wanted to use, yet had certain restrictions that required my help in implementing.

Dave

Ok Dave, think about if you were looking up a particular plant...how would you like to see it? If you look at the plants added so far, for example Dianthus (genus) deltoids (species)...there are about 300 species for Dianthus, deltoids is only one.(of course not all 300 are cultivated for harbacious boders, ;) )
Would you want to see each of them listed just the way they are now? Or would you rather see the genus Dianthus that could be selected to see all the species (with detail)under it? I guess I'm just thinking that both ways have pros and cons. If we list them all the way they are now then one genus could take a whole page...if we list the genus sort of as a "reference" page, then you could click on the genus to see the page(s) of species. Hope this makes a little sense, guess I'm tired. I'll sleep on it and lets get Poppysues oppinion.

Oooops! I added a couple of pictures to Jody's Joe Pye Weed write up & dummy me... I put the same picture on twice. I tried to go back and upload the one I wanted over it but I couldn't. I can't delete the repeted one either.

Woohoo!!! Thanks for the pictures sue, since I really just started gardening this spring I don't have any yet! Thanks so much! Hope you have some more. ;)

I think Jody's suggestion is good with the genus as a reference page then have the species listed out seperately. The catagory page (annuals, perennials, veggies etc.) might be a good place to start... then you'd click on the genus (papaver, dianthus, kniphofia) ..... and then have the species selection

poppysue,

I thought my picture upload code was really solid but I was wrong. The one thing I didn't take into consideration was the possibility that one might want to edit or change a picture after it was uploaded.

Here's what I'll do: I'll make it so that if you are the one who uploaded the picture, you have the optoin to edit the caption, change the picture, or remove the picture alltogether. That should take care of the issue, yes?

Dave

genus species

Okay, right now each plant in the database has the following information:

Common Name
Latin name
Family name

How about we change this to:

Common name
Genus
Species

Then, when the entries get changed to the correct genus/species, we can go about making the interface to the content much easier (click on genus to get a list of species, etc).

Does this sound like a good way to go? Am I missing anything?

Dave

Sounds great Dave.

If poppysue agrees that it's the way to go, I'll make this change Monday morning.

dave

That sounds good to me Dave. & Yes... I think that some sort of edit feature for the pictures will be needed. I can see myself making lots of goofs loading photos. Not to mention the typos! Thanks Dave!

Okeedokee, both will happen Monday.

Dave

Okay, I updated the image upload code. You can now either edit the caption, or remove the entry altogether.

poppysue - try it out. If there's anything else to do on this, let me know!

Dave

Genus and Species are now in place. I removed latin_name and family_name and replaced them with genus and species.

This means that whatever you had previously written in the latin_name and family_name fields will now be in the genus and species fields.

So, please go edit each of your entries to reflect the new naming convention. The good news is that there are only 20 entries in the database in total, so it shouldn't take much time to edit these.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if this isn't exactly what I was supposed to do.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave, I changed the Nigella. Is that how you wanted it? I noticed that the family section is still there, but no way to put family name in.

The family name there was leftover from before (I missed it in my cleanup). I've removed it.

As for your entry, take for example, this one:

http://davesgarden.com/plants/go/19.html

You have:

Common: Love-in-a-mist
Genus: Nigella
Species: N. damascena

I think we should probably get rid of the 'N.' since the N is an abbreviation for the genus, which is already where.

Later, we'll give people the chance to sort by genus, species, common name, etc, and any extra letters in front could disrupt the sort. I think the N is unnecessary and redundant since the Nigella genus has already been shown here.

Comments???

dave

Dave this is great, will be able to add a lot more and more quickly without having to look up the family names. It isn't something the average gardener really needs. Eventually it will be nice to have the "genus" page w/ all species under it. Thanks so much for your work!!!!!! I think this is going to be a big help for all gardeners. I have had many people e-mail me about turtleheads/chelone since the info has been in the data base. Now people can know exactly what others have to offer, and just a click away. :) Lets get that data base filled up!! Hope some others are able to contribute as well...like you said in one of your other posts...sometimes someone knows something you don't!
Gotta get going...
Jody

Mick, Dave is right the N. should not be there.

As for the seach function....be sure it is not case sensitive. Usually genus is cap and species is not but I can see typos happening in that area.

By genus, no problem. Go to the top page of the plants database:

http://davesgarden.com/plants/">http://davesgarden.com/plants/

On each entry, the genus name will be a hyperlink. Click that hyperlink and you'll be taken to a new page that has all the species under that genus.

Each entry currently only has one species per genus, but when we start getting multiple species under single genuses(sp?), you'll see how this works.

Dave

It all looks great Dave. I tried out the picture edit feature and it worked like a charm.

Dave you have done a GREAT job!!! I can't wait to add more species to try out our new feature! Looks great.