Tripal v2: An Overview

Tripal is a freely available, open-source construction toolkit for community-focused, biological data web portals. It is designed to help research communities to collate data in an organized and searchable manner, as well as, to build their community through research news feeds, conferences, and forums. Through its integration with Drupal, Tripal can decrease the cost of development and maitenance by reducing the amount of site-specific programming required. Tripal v2 provides data-specifc content pages (e.g. for genes, stock, etc.), data loaders (e.g. GFF, FASTA, OBO, GAF and support for tab-delimited files), and simple search tools (e.g. genomic features, germplasm, publications, etc.) by default, with site administrators having the ability to both customize or turn-off functionality as desired. Many customizations can be made through graphical user interfaces including changing page URLs and titles, search filters and results, and even administrative listings. Furthermore, both Drupal and Tripal provide extensive Application Program Interfaces (APIs), which ensure that all aspects of the portal can be tailored to both the community it serves and the data available. Tripal is available for download from http://drupal.org/project/tripal and has extensive documentation available on http://tripal.info.