The Cichlid Room Companion current state and direction

This month the Cichlid Room Companion reaches 14 years from its creation, in May 6 1996. It is amazing it has taken me so long to set up this editorial section. On my behalf, I have to say that for many years the editorial was part of the now defunct "Cichlidae online" e-zine. For those of you that did not know it, it was a digital magazine distributed by e-mail freely to over 2,000 interested parties. With the new powerful feed technologies incorporated into the Cichlid Room Companion, it had little sense to continue the time-consuming effort of producing the e-zine, and better devoid the time to other worthy projects inside the page. But the time has come to start this editorial, I was thinking to wait for a nice round number, let's say 15 years, but that is a year from now! So I decided to start with it right now. I enjoy reading editorials of other websites, and I hope you will enjoy reading this one. My plan is to write it monthly if at all possible.

In this first entry I want to give an image of what the Cichlid Room Companion is like today and what are the projects on which we are working now. I promise I won't be boring you with statistics in each one of these instances; I want you to enjoy this editorial!

Nowadays the cichlid room companion has grown into a monster backed up by 78,000+ lines of PHP code (I know I should get a life) and over 40,000 database registers, growing literally every day. We list today 1,634 generally accepted and 556 potentially undescribed cichlid species in our catalog, and illustrate 1,490 of them with 5,200+ great quality pictures and over 50 videos. We list all cichlids descriptions that have been written and organize them by year. Profiles for 65 genera and 518 species are completely filled up by a group of top world-class experts on each one of them, I am especially proud of this master mind that has taken me years to gather and is behind the page what I consider elegantly organized content.

We also have a growing cichlid habitats catalog. Over 650 documents including articles, reviews, interviews, breeding tank descriptions, section documents, and more are present in the Cichlid Room Companion. We have a complete index for Cichlid News magazine and The Cichlid Yearbooks.

Pam Chin has replied to over 1,500 cichlid-related questions in her popular Ask Pam section. I feel very honored she has continuously decided for the Cichlid Room Companion to host it.

Our discussion forum, as of today, includes over 44,000 posts. I am not talking about regular forum posts (e.g "Yeah me to" type) but quality discussions about cichlids with a plethora of valuable information. Thanks to Lisa, Ken Boorman, and all moderators for their hard work in keeping it a safe environment, not so easy nowadays.

Nowadays, the framework of the Cichlid Room Companion is translated into French, Italian, Polish, and Spanish, with many documents translated into those languages. We look forward to getting more quality translations for our documents soon. Any volunteers to undertake this job are most welcome!

But the site has hardly got to the end of it, there are many projects under development as we speak and there never seems to be enough time and resources to cope with them, but just overwhelming enthusiasm. Nowadays, as one of our main developing projects, we are working to build a giant cichlid reference base linking species with articles about them. The results will refer us to as many as possible sources of information for each cichlid species as we can find. Two Cichlid Room Companion librarians are graciously working on the development of this gargantuan project; Miguel Ángel Díaz Gutiérrez from Spain and Dan Woodland from the USA.

The Cichlid Room Companion is going forward! I want to thank you our visitors, contributors, sponsors, and subscribers to allow us to continue working on this site. If you are not a sponsor or subscriber of the Cichlid Room Companion and this site is useful to you, please consider turning into one and fuel our efforts.

Until next time!