Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 11:36 pm by Don

For a long time, we’ve had intentions of improving our reports. Now, we are starting to actually make some progress. The first enhanced report is our new Web Page Generator, which will appear in the 2.0.6 release.

We had a lot of input from a lot of people, and the final generator incorporates a lot of the ideas from may of the reports. The initial design was create by Steve Hall (digitect), and enhanced with ideas from people on the GRAMPS forum, the mailing lists, the IRC channel, and direct email.

The new site is customized using CSS style sheets, allowing the end user to customize the look without modifying the pages. Steve Hall has provided us with five high quality style sheets that are included in the generator. You can use these, modify them to suit your needs, or just create a brand new one of your own. We’ve removed the old “template” style of customization, since this was too awkward for most people. However, you can still customize the pages by adding a user defined “header” and/or “footer”. These allow you to add your own custom HTML to each page.

Another import feature that we are adding is a method of better handling copyright. Most people who are putting information on the web are doing so to share information. However, standard copyright law requires people to get the publisher’s permission before using the information. To ease this issue, we are allowing the user to select the type of licenese for the information. The default is “All rights reserved”, using the basic standard copyright notice. In addition, you can select to mark your pages with one of six Creative Commons licenses which will grant certain rights to the end user.

If you would like to see a what the generated pages look like (with one of the five default style sheets), we have a sample available.