PhpGedView

PhpGedView
Latest release:	4.2.4 / 13 January, 2011
Requirements:	Web server PHP v5.2+ DBMS (MySQL 3.23+, PostgresQL 8.0+, SQLite or MS SQL Server 2003+ 32MB Available Memory
Download:	Download v4.2.x
Installation Guide:	Installation Guide v4.2.x
Users Guide:	Users_Guide

PhpGedView is a free, collaborative genealogy program that allows you to view and edit your genealogy online. PhpGedView has full editing capabilities, full privacy controls and support linking to multimedia files such as images and videos. Your latest genealogy information is always available online for others to see.

PhpGedView was created by John Finlay.

Traditional Genealogy

Traditionally, you run a genealogy program on your home computer and enter all the information you collect. Several people (possibly located around the world) may be doing exactly the same thing. At some point you may find you have links to each others trees and you go ahead and update your tree with this new information. There are several problems with this:

1. You have to enter all the data yourself. This can be:
   • Time consuming
   • Error prone
   • If there is a lot of information, it can be difficult to decide which data to add and which to leave out
2. Relying on other researchers to update you on their progress is optimistic because:
   • They may not have the time or willingness to keep more than one or two people updated
   • They have to guess what changes would be of interest to you
   • They may forget what changes to inform you about
3. Several people duplicating the exact same records is a waste of resources, time and money. Why not work together in a collaborative environment!?

Traditional genealogy programs will allow you to generate HTML pages that can be uploaded to your website and viewed by anyone.

Traditional Internet Genealogy

However, there are several problems with this:

1. The website becomes outdated as you add new information to the tree on your computer
2. The web pages produced are usually static and thus don't allow useful features like searching for people
3. You may need to handle many thousands of HTML files and the multimedia files they link to
4. When you update a small section of your tree, you have to upload the whole set of HTML pages again
5. All pages are viewable by the whole world, so you may need to worry about privacy issues
6. This approach is not scalable to trees containing large numbers of people

PhpGedView as the Solution

PhpGedView solves these problems by keeping your genealogy data online and allowing you to edit it. Pages and reports are generated dynamically, so your website is always up-to-date. It also means that data can be searched, making it easy to find the information you are looking for.

PhpGedView Internet Genealogy

Collaboration

No more swapping GEDCOM files around and getting confused what versions you are trying to merge. Because your data is accessible and can be edited online, multiple people can work together on the same up-to-date data in order to expand and enhance your family tree. Alternatively, you can each own your own tree and then create links to each others trees when you find overlap. Collaboration allows you to prevent duplication of work through planning and sharing resources.

Whenever changes are made you have the option to review the changes before making them permanent, modify the edits or undoing them completely.

Privacy

PhpGedView has privacy features that allow you to set "sensitive" data to be viewable only by some registered users or to have data viewable by the world - i.e. You set who can see what data.

Open Source

PhpGedView is Open source and is proud to be hosted by SourceForge. Because it is open source and licensed under the GNU Public License, if you don't like something about it, you can change it yourself or submit a bug or feature request and let the developers change it.

History

I decided to develop phpGedView because I wanted to update the genealogy area on my web site and decided to look around for a dynamic GEDCOM to HTML converter. I looked at few programs, but was sadly disappointed at the design and layout of them. This led me to begin creating my own. I soon released the first version on SourceForge in June 2002.

– John Finlay

PhpGedView has been one of the fastest growing projects on SourceForge. In June 2003, after only a year of existence, PhpGedView made the SourceForge Top 10 most active list and continues to maintain a top 20 position.

PhpGedView has greatly evolved from its infancy as a website viewer into a fully functional genealogy application. This evolution has taken place over time based on the feedback of thousands of users, and thousands of development hours from many different programmers.