Some days after the release of the 4.2.2, which confirms the fact that PGV is a great genealogy solution with a dynamic community, I was wondering what are the next steps in development?
I can find some dicussions about the future of PGV, the features requests on this site, I know that there is some work on the GedFact Assistant (I wait for the Census release, even if I'm not sure it will be adapted to the French situation, in a first time), but I did not manage to find a roadmap page presenting the main milestones for future versions (4.2.3 ? 4.3 ? or even 5.0 ?).
Does that kind of document exists? If not, could I have an insight into the main planned features or enhancements?
Thanks for your answers, and thanks for your great work.
I am afraid that such a roadmap document does not exist. There are so few of we developers, and being open source, we are free to tackle what ever request or problem we wish. Maybe not perfect, but that is opensource.
Perhaps an explanation of how Gedfact_assistant came about may help.
I started on then known "Census assistant" module about 8 months ago. This was due to a request from Nigel (kiwi-pgv) and Stephen (okbigkid) both of whom are extreme users of PGV.
By extreme, I mean for example that Stephen has a site with over 70,000 individuals. (Therefore a big GEDCOM)
They had liked the work I had done on PGV "Lightbox/Album", and the Indi page "Family navigator", and threw me the challenge of reducing the amount of keystrokes (data-entry) to make Census transcripts.
This does exist in some way with Research assistant, but they wanted the data to be presented in their own defined way.
The logic behind this is as follows.
A census document for the USA and the UK, is basically a table, consisting of columns of facts for each member of a household collected every 10 years by the Respective Records offices (or whatever they are called) Columns like Name , age, martital condition, etc etc.
The UK Census Years 1841-1911 are available on the web, and for the USA it is 1790-1930.
PGV already contains in its database much of the "column" data required which can be "pulled" into a series of tabular inputs for editing if required.
The shared (or linked) Note was decided upon as the best method to link the final transcript to each household member who exists as an individual within PGV. Hence this is why the Shared note appeared sometime in April this year. (I had to develop this first)
The shared note was followed in PGV 4.2.2 with the GEDFact_assistant "Manage media links" as this methodology of linking media items quickly and easily in one go would be required for the Census Transcriptions linking to individuals.
This methodology could also be used for adding transcriptions for other events (Births, etc etc) so this was the reason for Stephen's suggestion to rename the project/module GEDFact_assistant.
There are still quite a few weeks of work left to do for the GEDFact_assistant/_CENS/ submodulk "Census transcription assistant", but when released, there is no reason why it could not be adapted at a later date to French recencement if the information exists in a similar tabular format. All column headings are in language files so can be easily translated.
(With a bit of thought, as many abbreviations need to be used due to page width constraints)
If you want any more detail, perhaps we can discuss this offline by regular email.
Brian
webman@windmillway.f2s.com
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Anonymous
-
2009-08-25
Jonathan,
There is no road map. Developers work on what interests them, plus as many bug fixes as they are able to clear. As Brian said, there are very few of them, and they all have "proper' jobs, doing all this in PGV for free. So, we can't really expect them to work to a strict plan.
However, I am aware of a few things that are being worked on, but no idea when (or in some cases if) the will appear in a release:
1 - Currently lots happening to make PGV compatible with PHP 5.3+
2 - GedFact Assistant, as described by Brian (currently for census, but its name implies it may help with other 'template' type facts later)
3 - an enhanced "Statistics" page
4 - improved tabs on the INDI pages, linked with an ability to manage modules, tabs etc from an admin panel
5 - the never-ending quest for greater speed and efficiency in coding
6 - some movement from table to css based layouts
(apologies to anyone whose projects I've missed)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Thanks for these answers.
I totally understand the constraints due to free developments, and I'm very grateful for your work.
So, I'll just wait and discover step by step the future enhancements.
Cheers.
Jonathan
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hi,
Some days after the release of the 4.2.2, which confirms the fact that PGV is a great genealogy solution with a dynamic community, I was wondering what are the next steps in development?
I can find some dicussions about the future of PGV, the features requests on this site, I know that there is some work on the GedFact Assistant (I wait for the Census release, even if I'm not sure it will be adapted to the French situation, in a first time), but I did not manage to find a roadmap page presenting the main milestones for future versions (4.2.3 ? 4.3 ? or even 5.0 ?).
Does that kind of document exists? If not, could I have an insight into the main planned features or enhancements?
Thanks for your answers, and thanks for your great work.
Jonathan
http://genea.jaubart.com/
Jonathan,
I am afraid that such a roadmap document does not exist. There are so few of we developers, and being open source, we are free to tackle what ever request or problem we wish. Maybe not perfect, but that is opensource.
Perhaps an explanation of how Gedfact_assistant came about may help.
I started on then known "Census assistant" module about 8 months ago. This was due to a request from Nigel (kiwi-pgv) and Stephen (okbigkid) both of whom are extreme users of PGV.
By extreme, I mean for example that Stephen has a site with over 70,000 individuals. (Therefore a big GEDCOM)
They had liked the work I had done on PGV "Lightbox/Album", and the Indi page "Family navigator", and threw me the challenge of reducing the amount of keystrokes (data-entry) to make Census transcripts.
This does exist in some way with Research assistant, but they wanted the data to be presented in their own defined way.
The logic behind this is as follows.
A census document for the USA and the UK, is basically a table, consisting of columns of facts for each member of a household collected every 10 years by the Respective Records offices (or whatever they are called) Columns like Name , age, martital condition, etc etc.
The UK Census Years 1841-1911 are available on the web, and for the USA it is 1790-1930.
PGV already contains in its database much of the "column" data required which can be "pulled" into a series of tabular inputs for editing if required.
The shared (or linked) Note was decided upon as the best method to link the final transcript to each household member who exists as an individual within PGV. Hence this is why the Shared note appeared sometime in April this year. (I had to develop this first)
The shared note was followed in PGV 4.2.2 with the GEDFact_assistant "Manage media links" as this methodology of linking media items quickly and easily in one go would be required for the Census Transcriptions linking to individuals.
This methodology could also be used for adding transcriptions for other events (Births, etc etc) so this was the reason for Stephen's suggestion to rename the project/module GEDFact_assistant.
There are still quite a few weeks of work left to do for the GEDFact_assistant/_CENS/ submodulk "Census transcription assistant", but when released, there is no reason why it could not be adapted at a later date to French recencement if the information exists in a similar tabular format. All column headings are in language files so can be easily translated.
(With a bit of thought, as many abbreviations need to be used due to page width constraints)
If you want any more detail, perhaps we can discuss this offline by regular email.
Brian
webman@windmillway.f2s.com
Jonathan,
There is no road map. Developers work on what interests them, plus as many bug fixes as they are able to clear. As Brian said, there are very few of them, and they all have "proper' jobs, doing all this in PGV for free. So, we can't really expect them to work to a strict plan.
However, I am aware of a few things that are being worked on, but no idea when (or in some cases if) the will appear in a release:
1 - Currently lots happening to make PGV compatible with PHP 5.3+
2 - GedFact Assistant, as described by Brian (currently for census, but its name implies it may help with other 'template' type facts later)
3 - an enhanced "Statistics" page
4 - improved tabs on the INDI pages, linked with an ability to manage modules, tabs etc from an admin panel
5 - the never-ending quest for greater speed and efficiency in coding
6 - some movement from table to css based layouts
(apologies to anyone whose projects I've missed)
Thanks for these answers.
I totally understand the constraints due to free developments, and I'm very grateful for your work.
So, I'll just wait and discover step by step the future enhancements.
Cheers.
Jonathan