Functional Drupal 7 Family History Website

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mike_san's picture

Over the years I have developed a functional Drupal 7 based genealogy site.
It was created using contributed modules and a slightly modified Bootstrap subtheme.
Entity Contruction Kit https://www.drupal.org/project/eck, Panels https://www.drupal.org/project/panels and Views https://www.drupal.org/project/views do most of the heavy lifting.

Take a look at it here https://sandesancestry.net

Comments

Fantastic!

ebrittwebb's picture

Hey Mike. The site looks fantastic. Nice clean page formatting. Nice relationships and navigation between peoples, families, places, events, etc. Are you able to import/export a GEDCOM file to/from the site? Do you capture all the same entities and attributes as GEDCOM?

What made you decide to build the site on Drupal, rather than using something like PhpGedView or Webtrees?

I would love to follow-up with you on this!

Erik Britt-Webb
drupal@ebrittwebb.com

Re: Family History Website

mike_san's picture

Hi Erik
Unfortunately the site does not currently support GEDCOM file import but I am happy to make all these structures available to anybody who would like make that happen or to build a 'Drupal Genealogy' distribution. Would that be you perhaps?
I chose Drupal 7 because I am familiar with it and it is VERY versatile. I tried both PhpGedview and Webtrees but they both look terrible on a PC/laptop and even worse on a small screen.
If you want to take a look under the hood I have emailed you user details. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Mike Sandes

Looks great!

Beakerboy's picture

I’ve had a genealogy module on the back burner for some time. I actually did some coding for both PHPGedview and Webtrees around the time of the fork. One of my thoughts throughout that time was on how much effort was going into the CMS parts of each, when effort instead could have gone toward the interfaces and display. I currently use Webtrees myself.

If you would like to release your source code in a sandbox at Drupal.org, i’m Sure others would love to tinker with it. I have release privs and can escalate a sandbox project to a full-fledged module.

On the topic of GedCom. Anyone know anything about the GedCom X “standard”. My understanding is everything is based on sources and records. You track your sources, and list the facts, details, and events that you are able to conclude from the source. It aims to prevent the spread of unsourced claims.

Looks great!

Beakerboy's picture

If you are familiar with git and don’t want to create your own code sandbox, let me know and I can grant write privs to mine.

Why not open source your website?

johnslegers's picture

Is there any chance you could open source the code your family website in its entirety (minus the family tree content of course)?

I would like to create a website like this for my own family tree, and your website contains pretty much all the features I'd want for a first version, except GEDCOM import & export.

If I could just set up a site like this locally without having to do all the config manually that you have already done, I might be able to find some time to look at GEDCOM support. And if I don't have that time, maybe someone else will.

Either way, I think anyone - including yourself - could benefit if you could release your complete website open source and allow us to make improvements to it.

Re Open Source Website

mike_san's picture

Hi John
I am perfectly happy to make this website available to anybody, however I'm not certain how to do that.
If you want to create a similar site you can download the Drupal Genealogy module I made with Features -- this does most of the set up. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ozxMyRm8Zv6F_RjgmxOWhOZj6jXOJ-_d
If you want to log into my site and poke around I will send you login details. I have a daily back up set up.
It would be nice if somebody could make this a Drupal Distribution, I dlon't have the expertise to do this
Mike

How to migrate / backup / copy a website in Drupal

johnslegers's picture

The Backup and Migrate module allows you to back up and restore your Drupal MySQL database, code, and files or migrate a site between environments.

It's been a while since I did anything in Drupal, to be honest, so the details are a bit fuzzy. However I did use it in the past on multiple occasions and on several Drupal 7 projects to copy an entire website from my local environment to a web server (or vice versa) and to keep both environments in synch. And I found it remarkably easy!

So, what you could do, is first use this module to create a clone of your website on your local machine. Then, delete all the stuff that's specific to your family or replace it with some generic boilerplate content. Then, save a back-up of that, and share it eg. on Github or somewhere on drupal.org, with a little bit of explanation of the process described.

That's how I would approach this myself. It would indeed be much nicer if someone could make your project a Drupal distribution. That sure would be a much better approach. But to achieve this, we'd need access to it first and be able to set up locally.

Using the Backup and Migrate module, you could provide us a backup and allow us to install your website locally with very little effort. And me or someone else could then start from there to turn it into a distribution.

Site clone

mike_san's picture

I have uploaded the 'sites' folder, a database dump and a text file to the Google drive folder. You can make a site with all the structures and some genealogy data with this.

Genealogy

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