[Mediawiki-l] Suggestions for using MW for a genealogical site

[Frank Middleton]

Mike Maughan wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to set up a genealogical site for our family history society.
> Basic requirements are:
>
>   1. shareable wiki (MW, of course)
>   2. access & update control (only members will be allowed beyond the
>   locked public pages)
>   3. genealogical templates (ideally)
>   4. import interfaces from other sources of genealogical data.
>
> Any suggestions, recommendations on this?
>
> I'm capable of basic sysadmin & config on MW, plus reasonable editing
> skills, but I'm an awful long way from being a guru ....
> 
> -- Regards, Mike 

MW make a great base for a genealogical site. I've had one up and running
for a year now and the users love it - see http://middleton-stjohns.com.
It makes heavy use of the DPL extension and has a custom date extension
to handle 1822/3 style dates. If you are interested I'd be only too happy
to give you a copy of the templates and the specialized extensions (I'd
put them on the extensions list at MW but I doubt there'd be much call
for them). It handles all of your requirements, although I use separate
Perl scripts to generate XML files from external sources (e.g., that
awful genealogical program a lot of MSWindows folks like to use), and
about 80% of my MW pages were entered that way. It gracefully handles
links to external sites as well. The Chronology and Index are also
generated by daily cron scripts, but you could easily use DPL instead...

Cheers -- Frank Middleton