Category Archives: Web Site Development

Why Wiki When I Can Program?

Categories: Accountability, Genealogy, Genealogy Wiki, Web Site Development
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 10 seconds

So I installed MediaWiki to give it a try. I spent a long time today reading about how to use it; trying to figure out how to use templates and tables of contents, the latter of which I couldn’t really find in the help files. Finally I settled on just trying it out. I created the navigation menu and headed off to the first page of sources. I figured I’d start with the sources again. And on my very first source, I tried to upload the image into the database, and it told me that it can’t accept “.jpg” files, only “jpg”. Very funny.

So I quickly scrapped the idea of using MediaWiki. There was nothing in the help files for errors like that. At least, there was nothing I could find quickly enough to not abandon the project immediately. I wasted enough time on it.

What I’m going to do instead is revamp my own database to deal with sources better. Instead of linking to web pages that took me too long to put together, I’m going to just keep all the data in the database. I will link the database to the image files directly, which will be kept in a specific folder just for the database.

I started renaming image files only to find that I really need to rescan almost everything. So that will be my project then. I will alter my database to add links directly to the images and provide extracts of the data. At first, I will add this information, but eventually the old links to the web pages will come out entirely. Instead of “uploading” the files into the database, I will just put them into a folder. I may separate the folders by family groups the way I did in TikiWiki just to keep the document folder from becoming overwhelming.

I also installed phpMyAdmin, so altering the database directly will be easier. I’m sure I’ll have to do plenty of that along the way.

And in the end, my own genealogy database will be what I use to create a wiki-like site if I so desire. I didn’t really want my relatives messing with the data anyways and envisioned them — if they did anything at all — just leaving comments or uploading more files. I’m sure I can figure out a comment and file upload system, even if I have to integrate my database into a blog or something.

To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That is the Question

Categories: Genealogy, Genealogy Wiki, Web Site Development
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 5 seconds

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, then you know I just got a new computer. It’s a Windows 7 computer. So along with the new OS, I decided to upgrade all my software. I downloaded the newest or newest stable releases of Apache, PHP, and MySQL, since I do my own web development and my genealogy database is self-programmed using those. I also opted for the latest release of TikiWiki. I had an old release before only because it would run on the old PHP/MySQL versions I had.

Unfortunately, the wiki program seems to have degraded over time. There were fewer themes and the old ones were utterly incompatible, so I had to go with an entirely new look. After not spending enough time on that, I started looking around at my pages. The wiki menus had changed and I didn’t like them. My Hebrew text didn’t survive for some reason. Maybe it was the way the wiki set up the database, but my regular genealogy database Hebrew survived the transfer to the new computer. One of the newest wiki pages I created was a name index with a list of surnames at the top linked to the anchors within the page. Well, the new TikiWiki version entirely erased all those anchors within the page and even when I tried to put them back, it wiped them out again. It has new plugins specifically for anchors and linking within pages, but they don’t seem to work or I couldn’t figure out how they work. The documentation site is usually non-functional, but I was on it briefly and saw nothing to suggest how to use them differently than I was already trying to do.

So that leaves me with the big dilemma. I originally wanted to use MediaWiki because I like the look and feel of Wikipedia. But I was also considering putting this online someday as a private web site and my current web host practically begged me not to use that particular wiki. They had TikiWiki installed and I was able to find an older version that I could install to my local computer. There seems to be a way to convert from one to the other, but it’s in Python, which I don’t have or really want, and it was done using an even older version than I was using, so it might not work at all.

I spent a lot of time on the wiki and was finding the initial results to be very interesting. I hate to abandon the project, or even start over from the beginning again in a new wiki program, but I’m considering it. I’m also considering going back to my original database and working more with that. My GEDCOM export was still riddled with errors and I wanted to fix those. And I wonder if I could write my own wiki-like program based on the database I already have. I was setting up some things quite differently in the wiki, so I would have to make a lot of adjustments for it.

So in the middle of writing this post, I installed PHPMyAdmin, which went pleasantly well. Taking a look at the database tables for the wiki, I noticed that most of the tables TikiWiki created are empty. One table has the text of each wiki page while another keeps track of every link between pages. If I don’t try to do the latter, I bet I could use the database I already have and generate output that looks like the wiki.

Once I get the rest of my computer applications set up and running, creating a wiki-like output from my current database may be my next project.