What’s next for Our Illustrious Family? Or a WP Genealogy Roadmap

We’ve been looking at what is in development for WP and WPMU on the net and the closest thing to active is Webgrrrl looking at creating a GEDCOM friendly plugin. This looks encouraging for die-hard genealogists, but unfortunately that is it. Lorelle on Wordpress asked for help in 2006 and got some encouraging comments, but there doesn’t seem to be any further action … And, of course, there are sundry, “This is the story of my research” blogs, but nothing in WP at least which encapsulates both publication and the story of the research. OIF should allow that, but there are several challenges which we are already looking on in askance — here’s a list in no particular order …

- GEDCOMS

- Multiple pages per family member

- Homepage tree display (deck the boughs with sprigs of holly fa-la-la-la-laaaa … )

- Using WP’s multilingual facility to rename elements of the backend to make the re-purposing more obvious.

- Intra-blog links, and intra-blog family trees to show relationships

- Exportable front page trees (pdf)

- Improve Family tree display with icons, dob and dods using a hacked version of wp_list_pages. Maybe even move away from vertical layout.

- sort out the bullet point issue (grrr!)

Of course doing my own research is going to curtail some of this, or maybe inspire it. Who knows.