On 10/28/06, m h <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Since it appears you're looking for a CMS system, drupal is quite
popular. It appears there is a ged plugin as well[1].
Note that I haven't used the plugin, so I can't comment on it, but it
might be worth checking out. Drupal has quite a large userbase and
community, so you might want to check them out.
I'm right in the middle of setting up a collaborative website for our
family. After some research, we've decided to go with
Drupal/CiviCRM/PHPGedView/Gallery2 for now. We're still getting it
setup so I'm not sure how it'll end up, but I'll give my impressions
so far.
For Drupal, I've done both a manual install and used the Fantastico
installer for Drupal. The Fantastico install is super simple, though
it still requires some manual tweaking if you're doing any
customization, which you're likely to do. The manual install wasn't
too bad. We considered using the CivicSpace Drupal distro since it has
an easy installer and already includes CiviCRM, but their website is
getting redone and you can't download it right at the moment.
The PHPGedView and Gallery2 integrations went pretty well, and they
synchronize the users and login so it's all controlled by the Drupal
logins. There are some visual quirks with PHPGedView, but most of it
works great, and I hope those are easy to fix. The PHPGedView Drupal
plugin docs are a bit sparse, and there are a few things about login I
haven't figured out how to do yet. TNG is an alternative to PHPGedView
and offers integration into several CMSes.
CiviCRM is more than we need, but it seems to be the nicest/easiest
way to get rich contact information for the family members, and has
nice groups and tags support and some mapping capabilities. Another
solution we're looking at is called the CCK, but we haven't done much
with that yet.
Drupal does require some hands-on work. It's very flexible and looks
like it will be the best to add some custom functionality we want to
add later, but does have a bit of a learning curve, especially with
terminology (nodes and other abstract terms). The Drupal forums are
active and there seem to be many helpful people.
I briefly played with Joomla, and it looks nicer and is simpler out of
the box, but is lacking the rich user contact info we wanted and
customization is supposed to be more difficult.
Other solutions we considered:
1. Jotspot family wiki (http://www.jot.com/gallery/wiki-life.php)
Free, and very nice looking and very easy to edit. I really like this
one until we tried to use it :(. Unfortunately, it is not integrated
even with itself at all. The family tree module doesn't take GEDCOMs,
and nothing is linked, so a user is not linked to their family tree
entry, and several other places where they don't link user data (i.e.
birthday calendar entry is not linked to a user). I also worried about
being able to export the data into something else as we grow.
2. Family Connection/Family Anywhere
(http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2006/05/24/announcing-familyanywherecom/)
This has a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer enough
features for what we wanted right now, I don't have have the Rails
expertise or time yet to build this into what we want right now. I
will definitely revisit this next year after our reunion is over (I'm
in charge of this next reunion)
I spent many many hours searching for somewhere I could host a decent
family website at a reasonable price with a minimum of my own effort,
and I couldn't find anything. Almost everything I found to be horrible
looking or extremely expensive, most of them were both, and very few
offered the features we most wanted (GEDCOM support, photo galleries,
calendar, blogs, forums, address book). I'll be glad to share our
research if someone is interested.
So we decided to roll our own using Drupal. It's been more
time-consuming than I hoped, but I think we can build what we want for
now. Once it's done, I'll post a link so people can check it out. I
think it would be very cool to put together a nice Drupal distro for
family sites with all the stuff nicely integrated. At some point, I'd
like to help code something, I just don't have time right now.
If anyone has any other ideas, please share.
Logan Allred
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