Saturday, August 13, 2011

Tracking genealogical information -- Drupal Content Types

My first two sites with Drupal were: A personal genealogical site with very restricted access; and a site for the Shaver Family Reunion group who are descendants of John William Shaver who settled in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada in the late 1700s.

Check out the Shaver Family Reunion group’s website, also known as the “Shavers of Ancaster”. The amount of site content is still a bit limited, but is growing. With content growth the group comes up with more ideas on what and how to track information.

From a genealogical perspective, you’ll find the obvious content types: person, place, event, and family. From there other types of content are emerging: document, publication, and organization. The idea of a definition and a note content type are coalescing into a content type, I call, write-up. The user can define the type of write-up they want: note, process/procedure, instruction, troubleshooting entry, FAQ, or a web link entry.

Take a look at the Shavers of Ancaster site and let me know what you think (comment here or use the Contact us page on the Shaver’s site. If you are a descendant of John William Shaver you are welcome to submit a request for an account. If not, but you’d like a Drupal site for your family history like this or have ideas you’d like to share... drop me line (use the Contact us form on the Shavers of Ancaster site).

In the meantime, the design and implementation remain very fluid.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Tracking genealogical information and other stuff -- a CMS solution

I have a large collection of information I’d like to track. With an interest in photography, history, and family history there are plenty of things for me to track, a large cache of physical items and computer files.

I keep adding and removing software tools from the mix to help with this never ending goal.

After working on a web site to track family history and genealogical relationships using Drupal (a content management system) I began to expand the focus of what it could track. In some cases I would not mind some of my data being Internet facing. However, most of the items and information I would not want the risk of Internet exposure.

I liked the simplicity and flexibility of web-based content management systems (CMS) over the many desktop applications I had been using. Without creating a home server I simply elected to install Microsoft’s WebMatrix. Selecting the development environments I wanted to create, I installed Drupal, WordPress and ASP.NET development environments for starters.

With a few clicks I had a site up and running locally. With a couple of changes to the site settings the site was available to my home network.

For the most part, the data I want to track is housed under one parent folder on my computer. So, to ensure the web site had access to these files I created a virtual directory and I was ready.