In February I wrote a blogpost on how Drupal Freemind 2.0 could be turned into a relational (semantic) data interface. So many months later we've abandoned the Java plugin in favour of a Flex plugin and with what result...
After I shared my ideas on the project, our Flex/services guru, Peter Arato, started working last week on what has become the Graphmind project. It's a module that allows you to work with mindmaps in Drupal that are compatible with Freemind. With building mindmaps I mean full CRUD, you can:
- create a mindmap node from scratch
- paste an existing .mm mindmap
- do CRUD on the nodes in the mindmap (yes that's namespace collision, but we can't help it)
But it is much more than a mindmap tool: the module integrates with Drupal services.
- it can render any view into mindmap branches
- you can add individual users, nodes or comments as a freemind branch
- if you use a view with an argument it will try to fill that argument using the data from the mindmap node for which you are trying to add that branch
- a freemind node that was created from a Drupal object has a hyperlink to that Drupal node
I am really excited about this module and I think that it holds an enormous potential. Some of the things you'll be able to use this for in the future:
- (re)organize/build taxonomies in a mindmap
- do project brainstorms/planning on a mindmap that uses data from your Open Atrium project management system
- display relationships between data objects in your Drupal database
- refresh or reuse a graph, to build a new mindmap with different data, but with the same relationship tree (e.g. most active user in the last 24 hours > posts of these users > comments on these posts > people that posted these comments)
- and somewhere not to far in the future: display SPARQL queries in mindmaps
You can find a screencast on the module on which Peter is still working on as part of a development sprint sponsored by Eureka! Ranch. So watch out for even more cool features.
