Ensembl 51 development

New design
You will already have seen a number of emails about the upcoming Ensembl 51 release - the web team are working hard to tidy up the loose ends of the release! We have got most of the major views ready, and just working on some of the views you may have never found before. As a taster I'm posting a few screen shots from our development site, the first shows the new page layout for graphical display of genomic regions (the old contigview). You will see many of the new design decisions in this screen shot:

• There are more views per object as we have broken up the large single pages into smaller components;
• Tabs for the different focus objects - in this case Gene and Location. Transcript and Variation feature are the other tabs available;
• A tree of all information available about the focus feature on the left hand side;
• Left/right pagination buttons to allow you to navigate between all the information we have about the focus object.
• "General" and "local" tools areas

Under the hood!

There have been a large number of changes under the hood of the web-site. Notable changes have been:

• Use of modified version of memcached to store and retrieve cached images, static and dynamic content, user settings;
• Re-writing the configuration code to automagically detect the contents of the databases and try and display the content appropriately;
• Breaking up of the component code into separate modules;
• Removing the need for a script per view - by using "routeing" style URL parsing to work out what objects are to be rendered and how... e.g. /Gene/Compara_Tree/Text displays the text version of a gene's homology tree.
• More and easier to configure renderers for drawing code.
• A strive for standards compliance in both XHTML and CSS; which should allow us to support more easily modern web browsers. We will be actively supporting Firefox 3+, Internet Explorer 7+ and Safari 3+ (and other similar browsers), while trying to make sure that the site is still workable in other browsers (at the site appears to work in Opera 9.25+)
  

New configuration panel

All configuration of the site and individual views has been moved to a common "Configuration dialog" box.

• The old "yellow menus" are replaced by a more expansive and easier to navigate tree of features. Important now there are nearly 200 individual tracks in the Human Location view page.
• There are more choices to display some tracks - rather than just turning them on and off, you can decide how you wish them to be displayed.
  
• Configuration for other pages are loaded in a similar way.
• The site has a common site-wide image width setting.
• The configuration panel is also where you will: manage your accounts, upload data, attach DAS and URL based data

Different renderers

For different data types we now support different renderers - not just collapsed and expanded.
For example:

• For genomic alignments we support, the ungrouped features (all on one line), normal grouped and bumped features at both full and half-height, and now also "stacked" features - "2 pixel" high glyphs.

We hope when you see the new interface that you will find it more intuitive, more discoverable and faster to use and most importantly more productive for the research work that you are doing.