Our Illustrious Family

reTheme, Simplify and Widgetize

Charles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:46:38 +0000

Had to happen really. The theme we were using was beautiful in Mac browsers, but very ugly in IE, and let’s face it, most of the world still ends up using windows in one form or another, so it had to go. What did we choose? As you can see, something simple, useable and highly widgetized.

I know, I know, this post is trans-atlanticized with the ‘z’. I apologise, with an ’s’. But actually, it is widgetize, because WPMU is an American-based open-source creation and therefore deserves an en-US treatment eh? Anyway, the widgets allow anyone who creates a blog on OIF.com the option of including all sorts of goodies in the sidebars, between posts, above pages and in the footer. Joy eh?

What has happened is that we have lost the opening family tree page. I think this is to the good, as the posts and research reports are equally as important as the people pages. Well, that is the way it seems to me.

The theme by the way is the excellent Thematic. We did look at Carrington, but it has too much personality and we did so want something we could impose upon … in a particularly kind of Illustrious way!?

Capture and the Living

Charles — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:53:00 +0000

Two unrelated issues we have been looking at over the last couple of days.

We have implemented a Captcha functionality sitewide to prevent spambloggers. This requires a little configuration on individual blogs, so have a look when you get a chance and ensure it is doing the business, otherwise you might get some unwanted registrations!

And the living? Well, we wanted to include the living in family trees but needed to institute some kind of opt-in / opt-out privacy for users so that, for example, dates of birth aren’t available to all and sundry. We achieved this with the Member Access plugin which can ensure that all pages are private by default. On Dixon-Spain we created a “You need to be a member …” page for the blocked pages to divert visitors to.

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

Charles — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:48:50 +0000

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.

Our Illustrious Family Opens

Charles — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:15:59 +0000

Welcome to ourillustriousfamily.com. We’re just about done configuring this version of WordPress MU. We’re using an excellent theme called Tworrder which takes Twitter as its inspiration, several page plugins, and the very useful Front End Editor. A little under-the-hood noodling, and we launch a Family WordPress for the world to use.

That’s the other thing, Our Illustrious Family is Free to the world! Why? Well because we intend to use the MU fully, having to hand over five family trees which need hosting — so it is all in our best interests — and you are very welcome to join in.