About this website
The most recent incarnation of the University of Arizona Herbarium was launched in January 2009, and was developed by Biodiversity Informatics postdoc Brad Boyle in collaboration with Herbarium Director Shelley McMahon. Our goals in developing this website were (a) easy maintenance, (2) consistent styling, and (3) maxiumum configurability (including the ability to add custom, dynamic elements to any page), with (4) seamless integration with our specimen database and search engine.
The content portion of of our website uses Wordpress blog software, extensively customized as a content management system, or CMS. Although previous version of our website were built from scratch using raw HTML, and later PHP, we opted for a CMS this time around to permit all herbarium staff to add and manage content.
We chose Wordpress because of it’s rich tool kit of out-of-the box applications, themes and add-ons (”plugins”) for handling such tasks as text editing, style sheets, image management, user permissions and version control. As an Open Source software project distributed under the GNU General Public License, Wordpress is constantly being maintained and improved by a large community of user-developers who provide new features and applications almost daily. We support the Open Source philosophy, and are proud to be members and contributors of this community.
Current components include Wordpress 2.7, an Atahualpa 3.1.7 theme, and several plugins,. We thank the developers of Wordpress, the plugins, and the excellent Atahualpa theme.
Our search engine and specimen database were built from the ground up using PHP and MySQL. For more details, see our Specimen database page.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments about our website. We would be happy to share out experiences.