Tripal: a Toolkit for Construction of Genomic and Genetic Websites Using Chado and Drupal

Tripal is an open-source freely available construction toolkit for online genomic and genetic databases.  It uses the power and flexibility of Drupal, a Content Management System (CMS), and GMOD Chado, a community developed and supported database schema for storage of biological data. Chado is also supported by other popular tools such as GBrowse and other GMOD tools.  The CMS (i.e. Drupal) allows for non-technical users to add content without knowledge of HTML or programming, and allows for community content such as outreach, calendars, and more.  The Drupal API allows the PHP programmer to easily customize templates for a custom look-and-feel to the site.  Tripal provides default pages for genomic features, stocks, genomic libraries, organisms and analyses as well as loaders for common formats such as FASTA, GFF3, OBO and GAF.  The Tripal API allows full access to all Chado data within the templates enabling site programmers to customize data pages at will and create new data pages as needed.  Online tutorials, demo sites and an active mailing list provide support to the site developer. The upcoming release, version 1.0 provides newer functionality such as support for Chado v1.2, a Chado upgrade utility, export of all Chado tables to Drupal Views (a powerful utility for custom querying and search tool construction), support for custom tables, faster loaders with reduced memory footprints, an improved API, and a bulk loader for loading any tab-delimited file into Chado.  All resources for Tripal can be found at the web address:  http://tripal.sourceforge.net.