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
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