[Plugin: rootsPersona]Please leave feedback on rootsPersona

Works great, just needs some polishing some user friendly things added, but otherwise fine. I’m using WP 3.0.4 and dKret3 theme.

What would you like to see polished? I am prioritizing the next upgrade now…

I’d like the images to pop out like in lightbox fashion, I’d also like to edit the person directly. And to unlink people who aren’t there. For example on my page https://www.tennessee-mom.com/hunter-family/john-w-johnson/ I don’t know his parents, or grandparents, and “unknown” shows up as a link on down the line.

Wow, your page looks real nice!

1) lightbox: images are new for this plugin, but I’ll look into it. Might need to wait for some improved functions promised in WP 3.1

2) edit: what do you want to be able to edit?

The issue I had personally was when I was using Roots Magic to maintain the ‘real’ records, the web page and Roots Magic would get out of synch. When I uploaded the gedcom again, usually to add new people or incorprate data chnages, etc… do I want to merge? Does the page take precedence? Does the gedcom? For me the answer was the gedcom, since Roots Magic is my ‘system of record’, not the web page, which is just for sharing.

If what you really want is to use rootsPersona as the system of record, I want to add that functionality, but rootsPersona was never meant to be a full fledged genealogy program, like what Ancestry.com has, so it will always have some limitations.

Now I DO plan to pull more data from the gedcom than is currently being pulled if that helps.

If you let me know what you want to edit (and your take on thedilemma I painted above) I’ll see what I can do.

4) unlinking: You mean in the ‘tree’ pane, right? Currently I am brute forcing the drawing of the tree – which means I draw all the boxes instead of figuring out how any are needed on any given page and only displaying the ones with real data. Dynamically allocating teh boxes is more complex, so this was a compromise.

That said, would you rather see an empty box or unknown in the short term?
Thanks for the feedback? Keep the suggestions coming! And again, nice site!

I installed the Lightbox 2 plugin, and it automatically started lightboxing the images. Of course, my images were huge since I didn’t size them for that.

But I don’t think I have to do anything to rootsPersona to support it; more an issue of just installing the plugin.

If you find that something in rootsPersona interferes with Lightbox, let me know.

Hey Ed, do you have any experience with GEDCOM files generated by Family Tree Maker? It seems to process the file after uploading (it takes a while), but after that it says that all available pages have been added without showing any persons. The namelist page is also empty…

Well, that was indeed a permissions problem. Now the file is parsed correctly and the XML files are generated and contain correct information. Still not there though, because when I now visit an individual’s page, it shows nothing. The page source shows that it ends a little too abruptly:

<div class=”post”>
<h2>Maurits Alexander Hafkenscheid </h2>

<div class=”post-info”>
</div>

<div class=”post-entry”>

I tried switching themes, but that didn’t help. Do you have any ideas?

Duh. Turns out I was missing php5-xsl. Now it works like a charm! Nice work, thanks for this plugin!

Glad everything worked out OK.

I’m so used to using php based programs that I just need to shift my thinking to using RM and uploading the updated gedcoms. So there really isn’t anything I need to do online that I can’t do in RM then update the info.

“unknown” in the boxes is fine.

Plus, I just realized now if I wanted to add information to the page, I can still edit the actual wordpress page.

What plugin are you using to hide pages? I used to have one ages ago, but after moving servers and putting my site back up, I forgot which one it was and there seem to be a million now.

I love this plug in, thank you again for making it.

Hi,

Nice plugin, works well for me since I upgraded to the version before last.

I was wondering if the person pages could have parents, siblings and children on them. At the moment you have Parents and Children of the parents (ie siblings) but could you include the children of the person the page is about?

Regards
Sean

@tnmom – Flexi Pages Widget

@swebby – Siblings and parents are on the ‘Family Group Panel. I have thought about adding more Family Group panels, one for each marriage the person is. Are you thinking a second ‘Family Group Panel’, or a descendants tree similar to the Ancestor tree?

I have thought about descendants, but there are privacy issues once you reach the living part of the tree, which is what I need to be careful of.

@swebby: I had the same question. I changed the following line in xsl/transformPerson2Page.xsl:

<xsl:template name="familyGroup">
        <div class="personBanner">Family Group</div>
        <div class="truncate">
            <xsl:for-each
                select="document(concat($data_dir,concat(persona:references/persona:familyGroups/persona:familyGroup/@refId,'.xml')))">
                <xsl:apply-templates />
            </xsl:for-each>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

to

<xsl:template name="familyGroup">
        <div class="personBanner">Family Group</div>
        <div class="truncate">
            <xsl:for-each
                select="document(concat($data_dir,concat(persona:references/persona:familyGroups/persona:familyGroup[@selfType='parent']/@refId,'.xml')))">
                <xsl:apply-templates />
            </xsl:for-each>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

This will show only the descendants in the family group and no longer the ancestors, but they are visible in the tree anyway.

@maurits I’ll try to add a separate panel for that

That’s great, thanks!

You might also consider adding two global options: “ignore dates” and “ignore places”. Kind of a crude privatization mechanism. It’s almost impossible to determine whether or not an individual is still alive (unless his death or burial date is populated), so I was about to change the plugin to ignore dates and places altogether so I won’t get into trouble with my distant living relatives ??