Customizing Tripal Sites with Non-Tripal Components at the Legume Information System and Peanutbase

The Legume Information System (LIS, legumeinfo.org) and PeanutBase (peanutbase.org) are primarily Tripal sites and serve as portals for genetic and genomic data to the legume research community. Most of our genetic and genomic data are in the GMOD Chado database schema. Most of the project's needs are also well served by the Tripal core utilities and its extensions, developed by the Tripal community and also by us. In the last three years of our development, we have integrated a few other utilities outside the Tripal toolkit. These integrations include the GBrowse and JBrowse genome browsers, multipage tours traversing in and out of Tripal views and non-Tripal pages, catalog of germplasm images, legume-specific NCBI services, and other in-house Drupal customizations. The talk will describe this experience at two closely related Tripal web portals, where the focus was on seamless integration, making use of available Drupal and other resources,and avoiding adverse effect on user experience. Some of these have resulted in Drupal modules and can be adopted at other sites.