Cemetery Surveys

I’ve put WordPress to an interesting use. I discovered WP only about 3 months ago, but I think I’ve made good use of the engine capabilities. The site is at Cemetery Surveys, Inc.

Since blogs are repositories for large, numerous items, WordPress was the perfect platform to use for genealogical documentation and cemetery surveys. It really didn’t take a great deal of hacking to arrange genealogical data in such a way that it was easily accessed. The site opened officially this Monday (May 1st, 2006) and the viewers are already grokking how to add genealogically-important information to the photographic documentation.

Of course, there are a few who despise the new site (and they said so LOL) but I think it’s a great improvement over the original site. But most of the current crop of viewers really like the way it all turned out and have jumped in with adding comments to the documentation pages.

There wasn’t much extra to do, since the the WP engine is solid and easy to graft new functions onto. I’ve created several custom data retrieval plugins and some plugins to tie, say, an individual grave stone post to its parent cemetery. The parent cemeteries know where their gravestone “children” are and on a main cemetery post it automatically displays separate thumbnail lists for the panorama shots and the individual stone shots.

The Geo plugin is a marvellous thing, since many genealogists want good maps to get to some of these otherwise undocumented and largely-forgotten family cemetery plots. My editors identify a cemetery post in the Write Post page of the dashboard (via a custom plugin) and the rest is handled by some custom SQL queries.

For the thumbnails, I created a custom picture-sizer so that the editors can download shots directly from their camera to the site. The resulting photos are sized on the fly to fit a given situation or placement, from 16×16 icon to as 1280×1024 view (for having a good look at shots of court documents, family Bible pages, etc).

To create the table of thumbnails, I made a plugin to handle table creation and placement. It has a little bit of smarts to size photos up a notch if there are less photos for a single row than then max number of columns. So the same routine handles panoramas, cemetery inventory list thumbnails and single/multiple shots of a particular gravestone.

I’ve created a custom AJAX-enabled search for GNIS information and another AJAX-enabled search to find cemeteries in specific states and counties. The backing store for those resides in an IBM UniVerse database and is connected to WP via a custom transport I wrote (no ODBC/OLE, completely from scratch). The UV database can be mined for a lot of other useful information, but in 3 months I’ve been playing with WP, well, I’ve been a little busy tarting up phase I of what will become a family interrelated sites, each aware of and using content from one another.

Now that Cemetery Surveys is up, my next goal is to recycle a set of PHP code that is supposed to model GeneWeb and turn that into a WP plugin or adjunct — I’ll see what fits when I get into the code. The Genealogy site is presently using GeneWeb, which has wonderful database, relationship-calculating, tree and report producers, but its notion of HTML **SUCKS**. (If anyone has an equivalent to GeneWeb in PHP that already talks to WP, pretty-please let me know!)

I’d appreciate your comments on my efforts. Be gentle, I’m a bit of a n00bie at WP 🙂 Any suggestions for improving searches or techniques will be gratefully received.