Drupal 7 Genealogy distribution

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lhridley's picture

Hey Guys and Gals,

I'm a software developer that works for a Drupal development shop, and I'm also an avid genealogy hobbyist. In addition, I develop mobile apps for iOS devices.

Being rather unhappy with the limited genealogy software in the marketplace that allows you to set up a site where you can collaborate with others on building out your family tree (like family members located in geographically disbursed locations), I've been toying with the idea of building out a web application that facilitates this. Along with the web app, I'd like to further enrich the package with an iOS app, and potentially an Android app for accessing the same web application from a mobile device, allowing for the uploading of photos, documents found while doing research, etc. to document your family tree research. Drupal 7 provides an easy way to integrate mobile applications with a web application through the use of the Services module, which basically lets you turn your web application into a restful server that can be, among other things, accessed easily with a mobile application.

How much interest is there in this sort of package? I'm trying to decide whether to do this as Drupal modules that will require a significant amount of configuration, or a Drupal distribution that will be more of an install and launch sort of application.

The initial rollout would probably not have support for GEDCOM uploading / parsing, but that is something that would follow along very shortly after the inital rollout.

Thoughts? Comments?

Comments

GEDCOM

dpatte's picture

I am also interested in geneology, and would be interested in your plans.I like writing algorithms, so maybe, if we can find detailed specs, I could write the gedcom parser.

MacFamilyTree

rufferto@mac.com's picture

Have you looked at MacFamilyTree and MobileFamilyTree? http://www.syniumsoftware.com/en/macfamilytree/

They are importing GEDCOM and syncing although not with iCloud. I admit to being unfamiliar with the application even though I own it. I purchased it as part of a bundle of applications which had other software I was more interesting in trying.

I am basically an iOS developer and experiment with Drupal in my spare time and to maintain a website of my own. I built a small test app using services a while back but never have had any client ask for integration with Drupal (yet).

Definitely interested

michael.k's picture

Turning a Drupal 7 genealogy site into an API with the services module sounds like a great idea, count me in. :) Also, as a Drupal developer I'm sure you're aware that Drupal 8 will have much deeper Services and RESTful support built into core:
http://buytaert.net/the-future-is-a-restful-drupal
http://buytaert.net/web-services-in-drupal-8

You might want to consider the active genealogy standards work going on at:
http://www.gedcomx.org/ and
https://github.com/FamilySearch/gedcomx

Lastly, if you or anyone else is interested in resuscitating the Family module, it might help you think about module structure and might even help out the die-hard genealogy hobbyists like myself who tried to build Drupal sites around GEDCOM files. Many people are working with thousands, or tens of thousands, of individual and family nodes that were painstakingly developed over long periods of time. I think it would ask too much of these users, or simply be too time consuming, to require abandonment of their GEDCOM projects. So if you want dedicated beta testers, you'll probably want to include that support right away.

Good luck!

Good to know

landike's picture

I am interested in this as well. Keep me posted.
I have a few projects in MyHeritage site and I use offline software.
But having GEDCOM I would like to integrate family tree with my drupal site.

So would be great to have some stuff in D7 or D8.

Competition?

rjohnson42's picture

I've been to a few genealogy conferences lately and heard about several commercial software products for genealogy. The one I know best is Family Tree Maker, which does support colaboration over the web. They even have iPhone and iPad apps for entering data and making data searches. Writing code to duplicate this functionality is a big job, and FTM and other packages are not all the expensive to buy.

The big money now is in the databases of genealogy data that people search. This is ancestry.com, familysearch, findmytree, fold3, etc.

I have written scripts to parse the GEDCOM data FTM exports and then have uploaded information about ancestors via XMLRPC to a Drupal 7 site using a module I wrote called bulkpub. This way I can combine the genealogy data with posts, trip reports, etc. I still maintain all the genealogy data with FTM though.

A note on GEDCOM: the GEDCOM "standard" is ambiguous and has been implemented in various ways by software vendors. I heard a talk by some software developers who had spent many months trying to parse all the many variations that exist. The FTM GEDCOM is easy to parse, if that is all you care about.

Collaborate with Gramps online project?

DowneTown's picture

Hi there.

I think the Drupal Genealogy distribution is a great idea.

A few weeks ago I came across the Gramps (open-source genealogy package) online project and wonder if there is any mileage in collaboration?

Here is a link to their blog:- http://gramps-project.org/2012/05/towards-an-on-line-version-of-gramps/

Good luck with the project.

It might be worth looking

linclark's picture

It might be worth looking into http://historical-data.org/ ... it's an extension of Schema.org. Once you have your content types figured out, if you'd like to enable historical-data.org output for the distribution, I can help with that.

I am working on getting a

Zarevac's picture

I am working on getting a stable release for http://drupal.org/project/family
Would be helpful to hear what else would be needed for this module.

Have a look at the user

tavi_10's picture

Have a look at the user interface provided by http://www.myheritage.com/ . It is the best interface I've found so far. It uses svg for drawing and ajax actions for interacting with the users.

I am definitely interested in this project.

Drupal 7 based genealogy website

mike_san's picture

I have developed a family history website based on Drupal 7 which works quite well.
The only minor downside is that you need to enter references twice and there are no automatically generated family trees.
I am not a programmer or web developer but I would be happy to share what I have and to collaborate with anybody on taking this further.
Take a look at my site at http://sandesancestry.net.
I am busy creating a document on the complete structure of the site and I will post a link to it here once completed.

Genealogy

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