Posted by adammichaelroach on March 24, 2010 at 10:47pm
Very Important
69% (31 votes)
Important
16% (7 votes)
Somewhat Important
7% (3 votes)
Not Important
4% (2 votes)
Unsure
4% (2 votes)
Total votes: 45
Comments
There are several GEDCOM
There are several GEDCOM compatible solutions out there that do a great job from the researching standpoint. For the most part though are generally very ugly and not very user-friendly.
I guess my vision is to focus on something that is more of a site to display your information than a site to research. For instance, each person has an individual profile that includes pertinent information, such as birth info, death info, etc. Also the profiles include document attachments, photo galleries, ways to create associations between other relatives, and so on.
The Scenario
After I've done all the research, and put it into my research tools, I want others (family, friends, etc) to be able to see it in a nice orderly fashion. I don't dare attempt to send them to wade through the complexities of most of the tools.
What I want is a nice looking "book-like" site.
Any thoughts?
Adam Michael Roach
http://getadamant.com
How do you get your data into
How do you get your data into the site? Most of the research tools can export to multiple formats, but not all support all formats. GEDCOM is one that they all support. If you don't support at least GEDCOM import, there needs to be some other way to get data from the tools.
Having a well integrated Drupal genealogy solution would be great. I find the theming to be easier than some of the other web packages.
I guess you get the info into
I guess you get the info into the site the old fashioned way, manually.
Here's where I'm coming from:
GEDCOM and other tools are great. What is / is not great about them though is the massive amount of data associated with them. In my personal research I don't always rely on that data as being accurate. I have my research tools and I also keep my own set of records. My own set of records keeps only that data which is 100% verified as accurate by myself. My vision here is a site to record all of that information and simply display it to the outside world. I would say to the avid researcher, having info about the family history to the nth degree is absolutely valuable, but in a family history site, is it important to the people you are showing to see all of that?
I don't see this as something that is going to replace any of the readily available tools anytime in the near future as many of them are very mature packages. What I do see though is an easily to use, visually appealing supplement to them.
Adam Michael Roach
http://getadamant.com
manually is a really bad idea
manually is a really bad idea when you already have recorded elsewhere. When we build familyhistory.mathews2000.com we used some module (can't remember which one right now) which auto imported the 6-8,000 family names we have and created pages for each person. That created the initial structure of the site. Then we just created additional content types that used node-reference to link back to the people which the content was associated with. Then on each individual's page, we created a view which listed all content associated with that person.
It's a very neat system and works well. It'd be pretty easy to bundle up something like that as an install profile so that when the person installs the site, all they have to do is upload a GEDCOM file which gets parsed and turned into people nodes which they then can start attaching pictures, stories, and other content which are all automatically linked to the right people and turned into easy-to-browse picture galleries, lists of content etc.
Kyle Mathews
To reiterate my point about
To reiterate my point about the GEDCOM's, my goal is not quantity, but quality. I think GEDCOM's are great, don't get me wrong, I just think there is a lot of misinformation out there, and I don't want it clouding up my tree.
Let me associate my idea with another common situation. It has become increasingly popular to create small family history books. Typically these carry with them immediate family up to maybe 1st/2nd cousins. Certainly this is nowhere in the range of the thousands of people in most avid researchers arsenal. That is what I'm talking about with this distribution. Like I said, I think that to attempt to create an out-of-the-box replacement for the many tools that are already out there is out of the scope of what I would be initially wanting to attack. Maybe it could be a future goal.
I think to say that any of this is "pretty easy" is probably jumping the gun. If that was the case, I have no doubt something would already have been created. Doing it easy and doing it correctly are two different things. I'm definitely not saying that anything that has been done up to this point was done incorrectly, I'm just trying to get a high level look at what the needs are and if what I'm brainstorming would be an asset to the community.
I am interested though in hearing more about how you achieved you import/modules used, etc.
Maybe this is two profiles; a full-out replacement for things like phpgedview, and a lite "book-style" version, which is what I'm thinking of focusing on.
Your comments are greatly appreciated.
Adam Michael Roach
http://getadamant.com
This is the site my brother
This is the site my brother and I built. We look at our family history site as more of a way of sharing the stories and history of our ancestors. I think a install profile that shipped with a number of pre-built content profiles (letter, biography, gravesite, etc), a custom theme (and panels?), and an easy way to upload a GEDCOM file to prepopulate the site would be killer.
familyhistory.mathews2000.com
Kyle Mathews
I think the path you are
I think the path you are heading down here is in the right direction. And yes, this is exactly the kind of solution I am interested in possibly creating. This would be something more for displaying purposes than anything else. A way to share the family history without all of the fuss and clutter.
Having GEDCOM (or similar) support our of the box would be a huge undertaking, and at least initially, is probably not something that I would focus on.
Having a set of overall goals though for this project is important, and I'm open for suggestion. Creating a new distribution / profile is something I'm seriously considering.
Adam Michael Roach
http://getadamant.com
You only need GEDCOM import
You only need GEDCOM import initially in order to get your data into the Drupal database. There are a couple of PHP based GEDCOM parsers that could simplify that aspect. At the same time you could filter out the information that you don't want on the website.
I attempt to keep my own data as accurate as possible and don't trust most of the file people have put up on the web, but that doesn't mean I would want to manually copy the data from one database into another.
Once you have your schema for storing the data in Drupal, a separate tool to import at GEDCOM file into it would be relatively straightforward, so you don't need to focus on it in the initial stages.
Have you started to pull together the requirements for what the package should/shouldn't do?
Doug McCallum
Great point about the ability
Great point about the ability to filter the info on import. I think that would be a good place to start looking into this. Focus more on the import aspect initially, but with enough forward thinking to work in some great export features later down the line.
I'm not even close to getting any requirements together. Right now, I'm just trying to get a dialogue going to see what the overall needs/wishlist is, then pick some of the major ones and focus on that.
I think some of the attempts in the past to do this have been "overly" ambitious and fizzled out over time.
Any input is greatly appreciated!
Adam Michael Roach
http://getadamant.com
I agree that some of the past
I agree that some of the past attempts may have been too ambitious. At the same time, having a long roadmap isn't a bad idea. What I mean is that you can get the wishlist and find the set of features that makes sense for a first release and work toward that list. At the same time, you have some guidance on where to make it flexible for adding some of the future features.
My wishlist for a first cut would be:
When data entry functionality is put in, it would be useful to have an AJAX or other similar mechanism to allow rearranging of the order of children. I think getting data display options and finding the data is more important than data entry if you have a way to import data from some other source.
Doug
GEDCOM support is essential
Considering GEDCOM is the de facto standard for exchanging geneological data between different systems, I would argue that both manual and automatic GEDCOM import/export are essential features of such a distribution.