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Web software for a family web site?

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I'm debating putting up a family web site. Like most families, ours is scattered geographically and it's hard to keep track of all the aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, etc.

A web site for this seems like a no-brainer. And I'm sure some people have written software to accomplish the "normal" tasks.

What I'm thinking would be nice is a web-based, newbie-friendly mailing list for gossip and family news. Mailman or whatever would do for that.

But thinking about it, a "group calendar" would be great in that it'd allow anyone in the family to enter in birthdays and anniversaries and such. What a god-send it'd be to have all that neatly entered into a calendar, eh?

So here are my questions:

(1) What other types of "family functions" do you think a family web site should have?

(2) What specific free software web apps would you recommend?

(3) Other thoughts?

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family photos

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2007-02-10 17:34.

1. Family photo albums might be a good addition.

2. While it is not a web app in the sense that you cannot upload photos over the web, I just tried out albumshaper after a recent vacation. I found it to be very simple to use, and it did exactly what I wanted and nothing more. Basically, you import your images, organize them into collections, and click on the lower right corner of a thumbnail to add a caption to the image. The saved result is an html directory tree, so you just copy it into place on your server. There is also a small html export option, which does not include the full sized version of the images. It is easy enough to use that family members should have little trouble creating their own albums. If people aren't running Debian, the albumshaper page provides source and binaries for multiple platforms.

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Re: Web software for a family web site?

Submitted by IntnsRed on Sun, 2007-02-11 16:52.

Well, here's what my research so far on this has come up with.

For primary features of a family-type web site, I'm thinking this:

* A photo album so that members of the family can upload and/or look at photos. (#1)

* A forum and/or mailing list. Preferably a forum/mailing list integrated so that you can use either one and still keep up with the news. (#2)

* A group calendar to keep track of those pesky birthdays and anniversaries. (#3)

* A tool to do genealogy would be really cool, since I have a couple of family members interested in that. (#4)

* There will doubtlessly be other features that I'm missing... (#5)

Solution notes:

#1 can be fulfilled by many different types of CMS software, or even standalone packages. This should be an easy requirement to check off.

#2: I rather like the way that Drupal on this site merges the Debian.org mailing lists into forums, allowing someone to use either the web forum and/or the mailing list interchangeably. That's a big plus to use Drupal in the project, even though there are other solutions too.

The best group calendar I've seen found for the #3 task is WebCalendar. That's a slick tool and should do the job nicely. It can also integrate seamlessly into Drupal since Drupal seems to be a part of the equation.

The genealogy part, #4, seems like a slick idea -- a multi-person part of the site to really build out your family tree. Looking, it seems that either GeneWeb or PhpMyFamily are the most promising package. The downside is there's no existing Drupal integration, though Drupal does have other options to integrate the genealogy component.

Pondering this, I like the idea of basing the site on Drupal. The setup might be a little longer than with some other package, but the Drupal project constantly amazes me with its vigor, common sense, and sound architecture. Drupal's popular enough that the unknown features of #5 have a good shot at being filled by making Drupal the base choice.

Now, if I only knew enough about genealogy and genealogy software to fairly evaluate those choices. Hmm... Oh well, I guess I can just rely on the fact that if they're fairly popular, they can't be too bad -- right?! :-)

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