As part of the Scratchpad program of work, we have been using the Drupal “Panels” module as a mechanism to assists users in instantly building and curating content in their sites. The video below provides a quick overview of how we have been doing this:

Panels display “views” of content associated with a taxonomy term. In the context of the Scratchpads, “Panels” are accessible by clicking the little blue plus associated with a taxonomy term via the associated block – see comment below. We have linked Panels with some additional modules (written largely by Ben Scott), allowing users to add, edit, and curate (i.e. show/hide) content directly from a “Panel” - all at the click of a button. Curation is possible in “Lightbox”, into which we have built a drag and drop environment through which users can choose to show and hide selected nodes. In effect, this gives users the ability to intuitively create “taxon” pages showing exactly the information they want to display.

By default users can choose from two sets of “Panels” – mySpecies Panels that display associated content from within their sites, and iSpecies panels that display content from other web sources (currently Google Scholar, NCBI Genbank, Yahoo! Images, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and GBIF specimen maps). They can choose to alter a Panel’s behaviors to control whether this displays content that is an exact match to the taxonomy term, or is a child of the original taxonomy term.

The video shows a crude demonstration of these features. I’ll put together a better (more complete) video when this work is complete. The demostartion site is at http://demo.myspecies.info/ , but the view controls will not be accessible to anyone without a login. The final version of this (expected end of March) will allow curation of iSpecies Panel content, as well as mySpecies Panel content, and the ability for any user to create citable snapshots of any taxon page as displayed at a particular point in time. We will also create a style sheet that allows the pages to be attractively printed, and add feeds to these pages (perhaps assisted by the Services Drupal module). This might be a mechanism though which users can contribute to projects such as the Encyclopedia of Life.

Note to self
In no particular order are the additional modules we have developed to make all this possible. Sorry for the lack of links. I’ll put these in when we have tidied up the code and released all this on the Drupal site. Most likely we will consolidate these modules to some extent before the final release:

• NHM Panels: Adds system tweaks and some styling. Will probably be added to the Scratchpadify module in due course.
• Views Setup wizard: Sets up a panel by creating a view from any CCK content type.
• Panels Vocab. Module: Makes any vocabulary (taxonomy) added by a user, automatically accessible to Panels.
• Double Click to edit: Makes content in a Panel directly editable by double clicking its title.
• iSpecies Module: Defines a node type called iSpecies and creates the “view” and “panel” associated with it.
• Table Sort Module: Makes tables displayed in “panels” sortable by clicking any table heading
• Rewritten UI Module: Custom patches the most recent JQuery user interface for Drupal 5
• View Controls: Adds our view controls to Panels, allowing users to curate content within a Panel.

NB. By default, taxonomy blocks are created for each new classification when a user adds a new category to their site, thanks to Simon Rycroftten by Simon Rycroft called “TinyTax”. Note that the behaviors of the TinyTax module differs from how taxonomy behaves on the Encyclopedia of Life website. In the case of the latter, clicking a name reveals the equivalent of Panels (i.e. associated information), and clicking the associated cross reveals the child taxa. Right now, I am not sure which is the most intuitive - we need to run some tests.