Taylor-Demorias Family Tree

Christmas is a time for family… so here’s mine!

http://family.garytaylor.org.uk

The site came about because I was doing a lot of family tree research which was difficult to share without having a package to read the GEDCOM file with. I thought WordPress would be a good way of doing this – and I’ve certainly learned a lot along the way.

Firstly, major thanks to Justin Tadlock for his tutorials on custom taxonomies (I needed to add those) and custom post types (didn’t need those, but did them anyway). I also found several snippets of code, suggestions and solutions in the WordPress support forums. See, they do work. Also lots of back-end hints and tips lists/sites to keep that part organised.

The publishing date for each person is set to their date of birth. Unfortunately, WordPress has a problem with some of the earlier dates, so you can’t list everyone born in, say, 1800 using index.php though the date is set correctly (see thread here) – though now I’m using custom post types it doesn’t matter. Families have a publishing date based of the wedding date. Thus the most recent entries/people are always first in the list.

Each post is also geotagged with the place of birth/marriage if known, and a Google map inserted into the sidebar in single views. Everyone can then be plotted on a global map

I also created a function to pull out thumbnails and excerpts via a shortcode (that’s how the families pages are built) and to list items based on what tags they have. Along with all the other small coding I did, they were wrapped up into a plugin so that I could display a different template to mobile/touch visitors without needing two functions.php files.

The template is an adapted version of Traction Theme by The Theme Foundry.

Plugins: Article Templates, Autolink WikiStyle*, Fast Secure Contact Form, Geo Mashup, Hidden Content, jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries, Media Tags, Page Link Manager, pageMash, TinyMCE Advanced, TinyMCE Excerpt, WP-Footnotes, WP AutoSuggest, WP Page Numbers, WPtouch.

Now, I know Autolink Wikistyle doesn’t work with WordPress 3.x but I fixed it enough to make it do what I need it for – linking to siblings, children and parents without having to put in all those links by hand (it’s a big family). Also, most of the pages would be valid XXHTML were it not for an unescaped ‘&’ by WP Autosuggest. Curses!

Anyway – would value your opinions. It’s not supposed to be perfect, just better than what we have, and there’s a lot of family to be added. I do like to play with WordPress… I can’t remember the last time I set up an actual, pure blog site though!

Gary