There has been an explosion of webpublishing option for Gramps in the last couple years.
The Web Solutions for Gramps article is becoming very outdated.
Can we start a discussion to explain the differences in approaches and advantages/disadvantages? This will help the options to be presented in ways that actually HELP prospective users make an choice appropriate to their skills & objectives.
This is a discussion that’s right in line with my current project.
Currently, I publish my Gramps data using the Narrated Web Site feature. However, I’m not really satisfied with that for several reasons. First, it’s not device-friendly. Second, although it presents a complete view of the data, it’s not always easy to find what you want in the volume of information. Third, in my case, with over 17,000 people in my database, some of the files generated are massive.
So I’m implementing a different approach, using a WordPress plugin and Ajax to present my data. Here are some features of what I’m working on:
First, it has a search capability. You can search on surname, given name, place of birth/death, and a date range.
Second, like the Narrated Web Site, it includes sources, as well as witnesses and witness events. However, unlike the Narrated Web Site, it shows the relationship of the witness or other event participant to the subject individual.
Third, it leverages my Consanguinity gramplet to show the subject’s pedigree, including pedigree collapse.
As far as I know, no other web publishing system shows relationships between the subject and others, apart from parents, grands, spouses, and children. Or pedigree collapse. There is potentially a lot of information in a Gramps database that can be reported on, with just a little bit of extra processing.
As an example, I think of the famous Nobel-Prize winning physicists in my database, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, both distant cousins of mine. Working at the same university, the two certainly knew each other. In fact, Kamerlingh-Onnes was a witness to the birth registration of Lorentz’s youngest child. However, I doubt that they knew they were 5th cousins. This kind of thing isn’t reported in the usual web publishing options. But should.
Another issue that bothers me is duplication of information on-line. Half of my pedigree is in the Netherlands, and for some reason, genealogy is very popular there. Chances are pretty darn good that if I’m researching some individual, someone else has already published information on that person. Often, you can find that individual in multiple published genealogies.
There are single-tree options like WikiTree. However, although I do maintain a few profiles on WT, I’m not a big fan of it. Whenever I work with WT, I feel like I’m using a 1990’s vintage genealogy program.
What I think would be cool would be a system where anyone can publish their own data, but seamlessly link with other published genealogies. That is, a sort of distributed single-tree genealogy.
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