Where History Begins / News: Recent posts

The software has been re-written with a focus on a shared family blog integrated with the family genealogy tree. The software is in testing on one of my servers. This is a significant milestone for the project and I hope to move it forward into Beta testing very soon. At that point, I will do an official release and post the release in the files section.

I am committing code to CVS now as I work. I'm focusing on article creation and display for the moment. You'll find the new code in the subdirectory familyweb of the top level CVS directory. Further reading through the old source led me to believe that much of it can be salvaged, so I'm sticking with a design closer to the old MySQL backed software (in favor of the eXist XML database that I was originally pursuing).

I am in the process of rewriting the software. After having been away from it for almost two years, I felt the desire to try again. I spent some time considering other software that might serve the same purpose with a little tweaking including various PHP based content management systems, but in the end, there were two goals that I wanted to focus on that didn't seem well served by the software I investigated. First: simplicity. I wanted an extremely directed and easy to use interface that would not be intimidating to new users. Second: I wanted, as before, a hard link between content and genealogy data. I have more experience with struts now and will be using it along with eXist for the second implementation. Will begin using the sourceforge CVS soon.

I have been slowly working on a significant revision of the WFG source for a few months now. The main features of this release will be:
* Use of jakarta struts and the MVC pattern (including use of Struts Tiles)
* Being developed and tested in Jakarta Tomcat 4 instead of Resin
* Refactoring of almost every piece of code in the system

Although the most recent release of WFG functions when configured correctly, I was dissatisfied with the result. I hoped the struts conversion would be simpler, but it turns out to be more significant the further I dig.... read more

Second release of Where Family Grows includes some bug fixes, some new features, and support for the latest Resin.

Sunday, 20 January 2001 was the first public release of the Where Family Grows software. If implemented on a web host, the software allows a family to share genealogy data and keep in touch. The release is alpha quality including basic functionality but in need of significant testing. Any help is appreciated.