[Ldsoss] Recommendations for family history site tools

[Shawn Willden]

On Saturday 28 October 2006 09:58, Jesse Stay wrote:
> I just use Mediawiki for my family, and it has worked great.  I set
> up a good howto page in the help section so people could learn how to
> post stories and other articles themselves, and set up access
> rights.  I also loaded an extension that protects pages from being
> viewed by non-members if desired.

I considered a wiki, but a "pure" wiki is too vandalism-prone, unless you have 
a Wikipedia-like army of editors to clean it up quickly.  So I was looking 
for something that allowed more control.

What sort of control mechanisms does MediaWiki provide?  Ideally, I'd like to 
allow anyone with an account to add content, but I want to require it to be 
approved by the relevant section leader before it becomes generally visible.

However, that may be more control than is really necessary.  What do you do to 
prevent vandalism?  Also, do you just use the discussion page for comments?  
Finally, how hard has it been for people to pick up the markup?  One of the 
advantages I see in Plone is that the kupu editor provides a word 
processor-style WYSIWYG editor which I think non-technical users may be more 
comfortable with.

> For the genealogy parts, you may want to look into PHPGEDView.

That looks really cool.  Looks like it's packaged by Debian, too :-)

How does it handle large databases (mine is aroung 16,000 individuals)?  Is it 
easy to get a GEDCOM back out of it?

> I use 
> Mailman for one mailing list, and Yahoo groups for the other.  I'm
> also considering writing a genealogy extension for MediaWiki that
> knows how to read GEDCOM files and render on the page.

What would that give you that PHPGEDView doesn't?

Thanks for the suggestions,

	Shawn