[Ldsoss] Recommendations for family history site tools

[Jesse Stay]

On Oct 28, 2006, at 10:41 AM, Shawn Willden wrote:
> 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.

I give everyone access to edit, if they have an account, and  
absolutely everyone has access to view.  I then installed an  
extension that allows those that edit to "protect" their pages.  This  
only allows those with accounts to view "protected" pages.  This  
allows living data to still be on the website without risk of those  
not in the family accessing that info.

I also asked (through the mailing list) all members to notify me when  
they sign up so I can be sure to give them "protected" access,  
allowing them to view and add protected pages (only those with  
"protected" access can view the "protected" pages).    I'm pretty  
sure there's a setting in there as well that will e-mail me every  
time a user signs up - I just haven't enabled that yet.

I also set up my rss reader to read the edit history page.  This then  
notifies me of any and all edits that are happening on the website.   
I have about 80 or so cousins and 38 Aunts and Uncles between 2 of  
these sites, and this hasn't been much work to maintain at all.  I  
also rarely get spam, because I only advertise among family members -  
you will get more if you don't require members to be members in order  
to do edits though.  There are also other anti-spam features to  
prevent any of that from happening.  I found the wiki idea encourages  
more people to edit, rather than requiring them to login to edit,  
organize their data, and then preview it like the CMS's do.  The wiki  
is more straight-forward and simple, in a more "just works" attitude  
for a large family IMO.

>
> 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.

The discussion page, with some standards and gentle encouragement  
from the site admin, is designed for comments in a forum-style if  
used properly.  My Grandparents get on regularly and edit and add  
stuff - it hasn't been very difficult at all in regards to learning  
markup, and I usually just tell people if they don't want to learn  
the markup to just copy and paste their document in and I'll fix the  
markup later (or other family members can).

There are also WYSIWYG extensions for MediaWiki that can be added if  
that is a concern.

>
>> 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 haven't integrated the PHPGEDView to be honest - I would rather  
just post the GEDCOM files on the wiki for others to download and use  
in their own Genealogy programs at the moment.  I've got another idea  
that will integrate the genealogy stuff a little better, but it's in  
the thought phase at the moment so I better not reveal it yet.

>
>> 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?

Just one system to maintain is all probably.  I've also always wanted  
to write a nice AJAXy web interface for reading GEDCOM files.  If  
you're looking for more management of GEDCOM and more features then  
PHPGEDView is what you want.  I was mainly just thinking about  
writing a simple  browser extension is all.

Jesse