Re: Xaraya for family & genealogy website?

"[email protected]" <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:50:36 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.comp.cms.xaraya.user
Organization Xaraya
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Banzai wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
>> A genealogy module has been on my list for a long time. I'd be happy 
>> to contribute to any group effort for such a module in 2x.
>>
>> Marc
> 
> Excellent. A genealogy module for 2x would be great.

Some thoughts. Such a module would likely consist of 2 parts:

1. A detail display of a person in the modules db.
This would include various text areas, pictures etc.
The display would need to be configurable because folks documenting 
their family history tend to have different opinions as to what kind of 
data is important and how it is to be presented.

One also needs consider things like references to sources, perhaps 
access to a common picture gallery, links to other sites for cross 
referencing, comments to the single persons and so on. While DD I think 
pretty much already offers the tools to implement this, this part of the 
module would involve a lot of initial design discussion.

2. Navigation functionality
This part is less a question of design: you basically need a tree/matrix.
Xaraya currently has this in the roles module, but hijacking users for 
this purpose makes little sense, so really a new tree needs to be 
created. Happily although this involves some grunt work, it's not really 
that hard. (It's also the part I'm most interested in)

Finally, a genealogy module would need to consider some further specific 
wrinkles:

"Multilinguality": this sort of boils down to name aliases, i.e. a 
person can be known by different different names and spellings. For the 
spelling problems the soundex system gives a sort of standard, at least 
in a single language, but then we have cases like:

Richard the Lionheart/Richard of Aquitaine/Richard Coeur de Lion

Data import/export: as a minimum the GEDCOM format needs to be 
considered, which for better or worse is the genealogical standard.

Marc