New Mineral Features

Some of the less obvious changes being made to Mindat.org are helping to update the database.

I'll let you know about some of the changes in progress here now, any comments are gratefully received!

1. Part-synonyms: Some names can be a synonym for more than one mineral, for example 'Fahlerz' - Currently the database can't cope with this, and I'll be changing it so it does

2. More crystallographical data: I don't want to try to rival webmineral.com, so I never intend to put the level of information that Dave Barthelmy goes into on the crystallographical side, but I do want to have crystal diagrams, 3d crystal models, and other fancy things. But before I do this I have to build a system into the database to cope with all this.

3. The polytypes field is stupid. It should be able to work this out itself from the formulas! I need to rethink how to do this one...

4. "see also", "polytypes" and "associates" all store mineral names in ascii text rather than dereferenced into numbers. very bad! I'm adding new tables for these.

Lots of work I'll have to do that you'll probably never notice!

oh well!

Jolyon