FAQ

We use the S.A.F.E. acronym for a WordPress Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) because it has the features of being Sustainable, Affordable, Flexible, and Easy. We find this to be a fairly unique combination for an ELN and so we want to make researchers aware of this relatively unique combination. More details are provided below.

S is for Sustainable – We use the word “sustainable” in this context in the sense that it will be sustained in the marketplace for many years to come. The stable WordPress Content Management System (CMS) currently runs over 40% of all websites, a market share that has steadily grown since its introduction in 2003. WordPress is open source with a relatively simple and stable core code base, which should continue to contribute to its success. With this market share and its history of growth, you can have a high level of confidence that WordPress will be a sustainable platform for decades to come. It is also likely that WordPress will continue to improve over time with additional features.

A is for Affordable – The core WordPress CMS will always be free and open source. In addition, there are also over 50,000 free and open source plugins that extend the core capabilities. Sophisticated premium plugins provide additional advanced and well-supported capabilities, most of them for a very reasonable price. The reasonable prices are sustainable because of the economies of scale for such a popular platform.

F is for Flexible – Concerning the flexibility of adapting WordPress for your needs, you can begin with the core WordPress CMS and then customize WordPress for your particular situation using appropriate plugins. The goal of this MyLabBook website is to help you in making good decisions concerning appropriate plugins for your ELN. There is a plethora of other resources on the web concerning plugin capabilities as well. You also have flexibility in hosting options by using one of the hundreds of hosting providers with a range of price points. You also have flexibility in choosing to develop the WordPress ELN yourself or to hire one of the many WordPress developers or agencies to build a WordPress ELN for you.

E is for Easy – WordPress has many positive attributes that can be described as “Easy”, which is a major reason for its success. WordPress is well-known for its easy installation process. The basic software setup of the LAMP stack is most commonly used for WordPress. This is one of the easiest software stacks to set up. And installing plugins is easy, requiring only a few mouse clicks. Custom plugins are relatively easy to develop. The administration interface has been fine tuned for over 2 decades to provide a consistent and relatively easy and pleasant user interface experience. The vast ecosystem of documentation and support also makes it relatively easy to solve most problems.

Of course, it is important to first determine whether or not WordPress with appropriate plugins can provide the capabilities that you need for your ELN. But if you determine that a WordPress ELN is adequate for your research needs, then it will provide a S.A.F.E. alternative that you will probably find to be fairly unique in its advantages for your research.

The features that MyLabBook has compared to other ELNs derive from the WordPress plugins. Plugins can provide the following features that are not found in most ELNs.

• Maps and Geo-locations
• Social Networking features, including groups, profiles, chat, and messaging
• Easy embedding of audio, video, sophisticated image display, and inline image editing
• Tracking of web page usage and analytics
• Commenting ability
• Mobile capabilities

Some plugins include several of these capabilities in the same plugin. For example, the Directories Pro plugin that we document in our knowledge base provides a directory, maps, images, video, integration with social networking plugins, commenting, custom post types, and backup and restore capabilities, all within the same plugin.

The MyLabBook approach would not be a good choice for several scenarios at this time. This may change in the future as there is no inherent limitation for WordPress in these scenarios. However, at this time if you have any of the following requirements, then it would be advisable to use an alternate solution.

• You need a large company to support you that is focused entirely on using WordPress for an ELN. There are numerous well-established WordPress hosting companies and numerous well-established WordPress agencies that could host, support, and develop your custom WordPress site. But to our knowledge, there are currently no well-established companies that focus primarily on using WordPress for an ELN.
• You need an ELN that is tightly integrated with a Laboratory Information System (LIMS) for tracking your materials
• You need extensive capabilities for documenting chemical reactions that include drawing chemical structures, analyzing spectra, and mining of chemical data
• You need out-of-the-box capabilities to physically automate your lab workflow (e.g., with robotics) and have the automation be integrated with your ELN
• You will need to collect and analyze large datasets with this platform. Anything above 100,000 data points would probably be better to collect and analyze with a different approach. However, the MyLabBook approach could prove useful even for large datasets if the data collection and processing was performed using another approach and then the WordPress features are used for features like social networking, graphics display, learning and educational system, blogging, or as a public facing website to share conclusions.

For many other situations, your financial resources, time constraints, personnel constraints, or your particular situation and resources would lead to the use of commercial ELNs or a capable open source approach like eLabFTW as the better choice instead of the MyLabBook approach.

In addition to having some unique features for an ELN, the use of WordPress can provide the following advantages compared to most other ELNs.

• Compared to commercial ELNs, WordPress provides a very affordable alternative because of the large number of free plugins and the low cost of most commercial plugins.
• Since WordPress is used in over 40% of all websites, it has a strong case for sustainability when compared to many other ELN platforms that might be abandoned if their business model does not work out well.
• Because of its popularity, using WordPress for an ELN ensures that there is a large pool of talented developers, agencies, hosting companies, and documentation to utilize and fall back on as needed.
• The basic installation of WordPress is relatively simple and well-documented and it uses the popular PHP language, the LAMP stack, and plugins for extending capabilities. The LAMP stack is also known for its simplicity of installation. All of these qualities make it relatively simple for someone with basic website skills to install and extend WordPress for an ELN.
• Again because of its popularity, skills developed for a WordPress ELN are transferable to many other domains like blogging, eCommerce, and general website building. This might be motivational for graduate students or other personnel to learn to use WordPress for an ELN.
• The use of a relatively simple and well-documented plugin approach to extend WordPress capabilities allows someone with basic programming skills to create custom capabilities for their research project.

Two publications from our group are specifically about the ELN and mention Drupal as the CMS in use. We have since transitioned to WordPress. Many of the same explorations are still relevant, however, since they are both based on a general CMS platform instead of dedicated ELN software. These two publications are listed below.

• Iyer, R., Kudrle, W. (2012) Implementation of an Electronic Lab Notebook to Integrate Research and Education in an Undergraduate Biotechnology Program, Technology Interface Journal, Vol. 12 (2), 5-12.
• Kudrle, W., Iyer, R. (2012) A Semantic Lab Notebook for Education, Computers in Education Journal, Vol.22 (3).

Some publications about the biotech background that the MyLabBook approach was developed for include the following.

• Iyer, R., Smith, K., Kudrle, B., and Leon, A. (2015). “Detection and Location of OP-degrading Activity: A model to Integrate Education and Research”. New Biotechnology. Vol. 32(4), 403-411.
• Iyer, R., Wales, M. (2012) “Integrating Interdisciplinary Research-based Experiences in Biotechnology Laboratories”, Journal of Advances in Engineering Education, Vol. 3 (1) 1-35.
• Iyer, R., Fitzgibbon, W. E. (2009). “Building the future biotechnology workforce: A University of Houston model”. Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, 15(2), 171-182.

Other publications or blogs that explore using WordPress as an ELN include the following.

• Catherine Voegele et al (2013) A universal open-source Electronic Laboratory Notebook, Bioinformatics, Vol. 29(13), 1710-1712.
• EvoPhylo Blog
• Quantixed Blog
• Warwick Medical School microscopy lab