A bit of history
Over the years I have been involved in some form or another in helping setup and maintain a few websites for the recording of wildlife – mainly birds – in Lancashire. This started over 20 years ago when I setup a simple website for east lancashire bird sightings with Bill Aspin. This is despite not being a web developer by trade – I did work in IT but specialised in servers and databases at the time. Eventually East Lancashire Ornithologists Club – ELOC – took interest and wanted an official version of the site with a more structured method of recording the data. I didn’t have the time to commit to develop it further so didn’t get involved but a new site was built which ran on a Microsoft Server with an Access database to store the records. This was in the early 2000’s if memory serves me correctly and the site ran successfully for well over a decade. However, as with all forms of technology the site eventually started showing its age. While the underlying functionality was sound the interface was dated and in particular was difficult or impossible to use on a mobile device.
Then one day while chatting with Dave Bickerton he persuaded me to help build an updated site for ELOC. Other natural history sites in Lancashire were now using WordPress and Dave administers the Lancashire and Cheshire Fauna Society WordPress site. I’d also had some involvement with WordPress as it is an easy platform on which to build a website. It also has the advantage of being modular so components – plugins – can be developed and added to the site and the style of the site can be easily changed with themes. So the decision was taken to build the new ELOC site using WordPress. At this stage, despite having administered a few WordPress sites I had practically zero WordPress development experience. A WordPress admin and a WordPress developer are two completely different worlds!
At this point I had built another site with Bill, this time for recording sightings from Brockholes which is Bill’s patch. The advantage of this site is that it could be used from a smart phone but it wasn’t built on WordPress. So the first thing I did was convert the Brockholes site to WordPress – which was not without it issues as I was completely in over my head with WordPress development. However the site came together and I then built the ELOC site using the same approach. Being a novice at this stage I made the decision to create a set of custom pages as part of a theme. This is one of the standard approaches of custom WordPress development but has the twin disadvantages of locking the site into a specific custom theme and preventing the recording database being ported to a different WordPress site with a different theme without a lot of rewriting of code. However this wasn’t seen as an issue at the time as the Brockholes site and new ELOC site were both using similar themes (as I had a hand in choosing them) and there were no plans for the recording database to be used on other sites.
However, after the new ELOC site had been in use for a few months it got noticed by some of the other natural history sites in Lancashire – probably due to a bit of promotion by Dave I’ve no doubt! The question was asked if other sites could use it. At this stage the main interest was from Chorley and District Natural History Society.
This was a problem for me as I’d gone down a bit of a dead end with the ELOC site by developing a custom theme to host the sightings pages and there was no easy way to port to a different site with a different theme. So we decided the best approach was to rebuild the system but as a plugin which could be added to any WordPress site very easily. As part of the rewrite I also made some changes to the structure of the database so that records for other fauna in addition birds could be recorded by clubs and although the first version of the plugin only supports bird recording, the groundwork has been done to add pages for other groups. such as moths & butterflies, odonata, etc.
It’s been a bit of a slow journey to get this far because I’ve been developing this in my spare time and (did I say) I’m not a WordPress developer. But it’s been a very enjoyable process and we’ve got lots of ideas for new features that will now be easier to implement by updating the plugin.
The plugin has the stunningly original name of “Wildlife Recording Database” and you can read more about how it works here.