Without website developers, Supplybrary would not exist. To thank everyone who has made this site possible, we have made a list of developers and contributors. You can see that list by clicking here. Supplybrary Credits
Want to contribute to Supplybrary?
It is the mission of Supplybrary to catalog every object ever used; past, present and future; real and fictional. Think IMDB for supplies, but also think Wikipedia because we allow users to add and amend facts about supplies.
The focus of Supplybrary is to research items people find useful. The who, what, when, where, why, and how of everything humans use. The information gained from that research can be used in many ways. For example,
- Show new inventors the best way to invent something.
- Find bottlenecks in manufacturing processes to reduce the time and money spent making things.
- Find the most earth friendly materials to make things out of, and let people know if the supply they are using is harmful to them or the environment.
- Allow scholars to document the supplies humans have used in the past, and suggest how we could use supplies more effectively in the future.
- Allow anyone to find just the part they need for their project or repair. When you know every manufacturer that was used to create a complex machine, you can order just the part you need from the manufacturer that makes that part.
We are always looking for ways to improve the functionality, performance, and usability of Supplybrary. We welcome any suggestions or code you want to contribute. If you have an idea of how to make Supplybrary better, let us know.
The Platform
Supplybrary has gone through a few variations, but we have basically stayed with the same technology. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Recently, we have switched Supplybrary to run on WordPress 3.1.2. WordPress 3.0 introduced taxomomies, and custom post types, which makes finding relationships between supplies much easier.
WordPress also allows an easy way to add new features and functionality with plugins. A plugin can be developed and activated for any specific need, and that makes Supplybray flexible enough to develop easily.
We use a modified version of the default Twenty-Ten WordPress 3.0 theme.
Supplybrary is hosted on Godaddy Grid Servers and Rackspace Cloud Servers alternately.
On Track
Here is a list of things we would like to develop for Supplybrary. Many of these things can be accomplished with plugins or changes in the code, but some require server configurations or other areas of expertise.
- High performance server configuration. The fastest way to deliver pages. PHP takes a long time to render each page. What is the best way to combine cloud servers, page cache, content delivery networks, etc?
- Drag and drop categories. An easy way to navigate the categories and change their hierarchy easily. We also want to know how our users would categorize a supply, so having a drag and drop category voting system would be useful.
Tabs in the post window.Supplybrary uses Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How to describe a supply, so having a tab for each while writing a post will ensure the information is clearly separated.Thank you David Stump of Atomic Interactive for the custom plugin.- Supply within a supply. Currently, if we want to show a part of a complex machine, we have to add links to those parts while writing the post. This process would go much faster if users could just add the part as a single supply, then drag and drop the part into the supply that it is a part of. When the main supply is viewed as a page, the parts of that supply are automatically listed below.
- Label: Value. A standard way of entering individual supply facts. WordPress 3.5 has a powerful Taxonomy function. A Taxonomy could be used as a Label: Then the Taxonomy Terms can be used as Values. Here is an example input form.
These are some of the bigger additions we would like to see. You can suggest other improvements below by amending this page. You can also send plugins, code changes, and performance tweaks to everything@supplybrary.com. If we use anything from you in Supplybrary, we will credit you for it.
