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Howto: Make a genealogy website with Gramps

2,043 bytes added, 22:23, 21 January 2013
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Gramps
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This is a Howto on how to make a genealogy website with GRAMPS Gramps 2.2.x. and the NarrativeWeb plugin.
The website will be made with the narrative website report, of which the interface is described at: [[Generating Web pages]]. The goal is to offer a complete howto/tutorial on using this report, from conception, to uploading your genealogical website to an internet service provider (ISP).
== Before you start ==
You can easily generate a nice looking web site from within GRAMPSGramps.
Before you start you should have an idea about the data you want to have on the website. If you are not careful, and generate a webpage from your complete database, the amount of generated files can be '''huge''', as well as taking up a lot of space.
==How to limit the amount of data==
If you have a large database, it is wise to start with a [[filter]] to limit the number of personspeople: In the People view of GRAMPSGramps, go to the View menu, and activate the Filter sidebar. Next, go to ''{{man menu|Edit menu--> Person Filter Editor''}} menu, and make a suitable filter. Read the [http://gramps-project.org/gramps-manual/2.2/en/ch03s10.html#tools-util-cfe help manual] if necessary. Once a filter is defined, you can test it in the People view, by selecting the filter in the Filter Sidebar, and clicking find. You can combine filters (yes, it helps if you have experience with some basic and/or logic) until you have a selection of all the people you want on your website.
==Make a Home Page, Introduction Page, and more==
===What?===
Before you use the plugin ''NarrativeWeb'', you should make some custom pages with the information not yet in GRAMPSGramps:
* a Home page: the starting page of the website
* Introduction Page: page where you can give an introduction of your research, ...
* Publisher info: extra information on you, the publisher of the page, to appear on every page
Note that GRAMPS Gramps works with stylesheets, so the exact ordering, and look of the website is all contained in '''one''' file, the stylesheet, eg narrative.css. You should at this moment NOT concern yourself about style, only content, and some basic markup (paragraphs, italic/bold text, div sections, ...).
===How?===
Go to the Media View in GRAMPSGramps, and click on the add icon. In the ''Select a media object'' dialog, you need to click on the option ''Internal Note'', and give a title, eg ''Home Page'', ''Footer'', ...
Next, you select the new media object, and edit it (double click or Edit button). Everything you write in the Note tab of the media object, will appear on your webpage if you select this media object during the website generation.
If you know html, you can just type the text with the needed html codes. If you do not know html, consider making a page with a web editor like Bluefish, Quanta Plus, ... . These contain icons to dynamically create webpages. The html text created like this can then be copied in the note section of your ''Home Page'' GRAMPS Gramps media object.
Tip: if you are experienced with style, you can use specific div tags in your pages, and edit the style sheet to contain your custom tags.
==Choosing the layout==
GRAMPS Gramps has some nice standard layout schemes. Those are kept in so-called cascading style sheets (.css files). In GRAMPS Gramps 2.2.x, six are supplied. You are free to edit these files (other lettertypes, other colours, ...).
Whatever the style you choose, after generation, it will default to the ''narrative.css'' file which will be placed in the dir you indicate. If you have some experience with websites you can easily customise this one file and without changing the content files, your web pages will be completely changed to the form, colours, etc. that you specified. Do backup these changes, as you might easily regenerate your website and overwrite this file by error.
*Sharp - TODO
If you make a nice custom style sheet, please share with other GRAMPS Gramps users. You can do this by adding a link to your webpage in the examples below and adding to your css file that its copyright is creative commons alike, or you can send it to the developers on: gramps-devel <at> lists.sourceforge.net
==Generate the pages==
In the Report menu, choose ''{{man menu|Web Page-->Narrative Web Site''}}.
Chose Choose a suitable directory where you want to generate your website locally. It is best to do this locally, and upload your website only afterwards.
In the Report Options Tab, set the filter you created. Choose a '''GOOD''' title for your webpage. Choose file extension: html (the rest is for experienced users), Set character encoding to Unicode (only use other encoding if you have very specific reasons). Choose the style you want and set the copyright notice (use the footer for specific extra legalese necessary in your country). '''Think about copyright!''' Ancestor graph generation relates to the how many ancestors will be visible on the people pages in a nice graph. Try different settings for this.
In the Page Generation Tab, choose the internal notes you created, as related above. I suggest you suppress the GRAMPS ID, as visitors are not interested in this. Be careful with the option ''Include images and media objects''. '''Only choose this option if 1) :# your site can be VERY big, 2) # you extensively use the private marker on sensitive data'''. Many people have burnt themselves with this option, publishing private email conversations they stored for research reasons in GRAMPSGramps, on the net without realisingrealizing.
The Privacy Tab is last, but '''is one of the most important settings''' . Take the Make it a habit to never to include private data, and restrict the information on living people. I suggest you set the ''years to restrict from person's death'' to a '''minimum of 25 years'''! This will prevent grave mistakes having sour consequences. Many genealogists have found themselves in disputes due to publication of information on living people. You have been warned. Also take into account local legislation (very strict in eg e.g. Italy, France).
Now you just click ok and GRAMPS Gramps starts generating your web page : a lot of files and directories will be made, so this will take some time. But when it is completed you will be the proud owner of a complete structure ready to publish on the WWW.
==Regeneration of your site==
Every time you change your database you need to regenerate your site to see the changes. Although GRAMPS Gramps will regenerate the entire site, '''only the pages with changed data''' will be different. You therefore need not republish all the website to the internet again, but can limit yourself to only upload the changed pages. Specific tools to do this exist, like sitecopy. See further.
'''Limitation''': If you upgrade GRAMPSGramps, changes might have happened to the website generation, meaning all pages will have changed. Investigate this before you upgrade, and consider the benefits of upgrading against this possible drawback.
==Publishing==
First, check the size of your web page. Go to the directory where you stored the web site, and in a modern file browser, right-click and select properties. This normally allows to calculate the directory size. Write down this info, and check your webhosting contract. Above a certain size, you will need to pay extra. Investigate before you burn yourself! If your site is too large, you can make a filter which produces a smaller website, or disable images, or split your site in pieces, and host it with different providers.
There are some free providers around: eg Lycos , but there are maybe better alternatives. Also GRAMPS offers '''free''' hosting of family website. Check out [[GRAMPS:Webhosting|webhosting by the GRAMPS project]].
===Transfer your files===
*[http://www.lyra.org/sitecopy/ [sitecopy]]: This is generally the best option. Only changed pages are uploaded to the server hosting your website. You can install sitecopy with every distribution via the package manager. Read the manual, it is self-explanatory: type in a console <code>man sitecopy</code> (or in konqueror type address <code>man:sitecopy</code>). Please, add a wiki page to Windows or Mac OS users could try [[sitecopyhttp://filezilla-project.org/ FileZilla client]] if you have experience and want to help new users.
*rsync : This is for advanced linux users. It is a better solution than sitecopy, but you need full access to the webhost, which normal users normally not have. Rsync only uploads the changes to a file, whereas sitecopy uploads the entire file.
*ftp/ssh: You can also use a wide range of ftp clients to upload your site. The easiest for new users is in GNOME/KDE, go to Remote Places, and click to add a new remote place. Choose the settings for your provider (ftp/ssh, login, password), and now you can drag and drop files in Nautilius/Konqueror, like on your own PC. You can also use one of the many specific ftp applications, like gFTP (it should be in the repositories of your distribution). Basically you transfer all the files to the server and that's it. However : as you have probably seen, you created with "NarrativeWeb" an awefull awful lot of directories and files, so transferring the vast amount of files will take some time! If you update your site often, consider to learn learning sitecopy!
== Examples of websites==
Feel free to add your with GRAMPS Gramps generated website here. Please, remove missing links if you encounter those. Style is one of the GRAMPS Gramps styles, or custom.
{|{{prettytable}} align="center"
|'''Site'''||'''Style'''||'''Language'''||'''Comment'''
|-
|[http://familiemalengiermalengier.befreehosting.com/ Malengier] ||Modern Basic (Mainz) || Dutch ||
|-
|[http://users.telenet.be/frederik.de.richter/stamvaders.html De Richter]||Custom made ||Dutch || version 2.2.6
|-
|[http://ancestryfamily.queervisionsdave.comorg.uk/ The Coy Yaeger Ancestry ProjectCross Family Tree] ||Antique Basic (Ash)|| English || version 2.23.604
|-
|[http://familywww.davexs4all.orgnl/~bosharst/gramps/ Van den Bos - Van der Harst]||Basic (Spruce)||Dutch||version 3.3.1-1|-|[http://arakiel.co.uk/ Cross Family Treetree/ Arakiel & Families of The Marches]||Basic (Ash)||English||version 3.04 2.0-1
|}
== Comparison with other programs==
There are two types of genealogy websites: static and dynamic. Static pages are ideal if you are limited with webspace, or want full control over your data. You have a genealogical database on your PC, and you select the data you want on a website, you upload this, and you are finished. GRAMPS Gramps website generation belongs in this category.
Dynamic websites have all the genealogical data on a server, and dynamically offer webpages, typically with javascript. This normally requires more disk space, however due to compression of the data, this might not be too bad. Dynamic websites are a great tool to collaborate on genealogical research with other people, as you normally have the option to change the data from within the website. For example, [http://www.phpgedview.net/ PhpGedview] is an open source project offering exactly this. A possible disadvantage is that for this too work, your service provider must offer you sufficient bandwith, or otherwise serving pages can be slow.
The beauty of open source is that you can choose the environment to work with, and the environment to generate your website with. The benefits of collaborating should also not be exaggerated, however, it might be a good idea to offer in the footer of your GRAMPS Gramps generated website the option to send you feedback, like the example on [http://developers.gramps-project.org/tiki-index.php?page=MissingInformationReport this page].
== Changes you can do - For more advanced Users==
===Changing the narrative.css===
As mentioned, with a standard text editor (gedit) you can adapt your css file. Not happy with the colours or fonts? Change them! The beauty of the cascading style sheet is that if you make a change here, all your pages will change. Dada! Now one thing to watch out for is that if you make changes and you finally obtained a good style sheet, that you save a backup in another directory than the one GRAMPS Gramps made. Why? The next time you let GRAMPS Gramps generate some webpages, the program will re-install the default narrative.css and bye bye changes. You can on regeneration of your website select the option in GRAMPS Gramps to NOT use a css, but this is easily overseen, especially if you generate different websites with different requirements
===Go for the real thing===
If everything went according to plan, you can repeat all the steps with a larger number of people. However, be cautious But hold your horses for just a sec First check out the amount of Mb MB this first attempt generated. This is important as your host limits the amount of data you can put on his server. Lycos for example (the free as in beer version) allows you a nifty 50 MbMB. But as your database can hold an unlimited amount of persons and pictures this is easily obtained. A very important parameter is the amount of images (media objects) you put on your site. If you have, say 50 images of 500 Kb KB then half of your diskspace is gone already.
===Splitting the database for hosting===
What if your database is really really huge? I did not try this yet, but you could split your data, say ''the descendants of Jacobus Roelants'' on one Lycos site and the other part of the family ''the descendants of Sebadiah Johansson '' on another Lycos site and so on. It should be fairly easy to install links to switch between sites, eg in the home page, as the directory structure GRAMPS Gramps generates does not change. ===Changing a word present on multiple pages===  #! /bin/sh # filename : replaceall # usage: ./replaceall X Y # ------------------------------------------------------- find . -type f -name '*.html' -print | while read i do sed -i.BAK "s|$1|$2|g" $i done This will find all programs here and below, and changes all X to Y. This uses the -i (in-place edits) available on most sed editor programs. It also creates backup copies (ending in .BAK) of the files that change. You may need to use special escaping characters if you use replaceall.sh with more than just simple letters.
Save this as a file named ''replaceall'', give it executive rights (chmod +x). Then start the script at the root of web site generated by Gramps :  $ ./replaceall Souche Arbre Which will change all instances of "Souche" with "Arbre" in all files ending in .html. To replace more than one word, use double quotes, like:  $ ./replaceall "Souche Family" "Arbre Family Tree" Source :  * [http://pascal.ledisque.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1122 Pascal Le Disqué]* Enhancement by D.S. Blank, Aug 18, 2009 ==Code modifications== ===Alternate Code=Comments==
If you have any comments, remarks, suggestions or alterationsSee [http:/adaptations or plain questions send me an e-mail frederik/www.dethomjoy.richter at pandora.be. You could also edit this wiki page, or use the Talk pageus/gramps. It's free source so use ithtml ThomsWeb].
===Multilingual Web Site===
Some people generated multilingual web site.
[http://www.chailloux.org/public/geneal/gramps/ Here] an attempt :
* 5 line Line change on 'NarrativeWeb.py'
<JERpre> add the country icons, using the #PATH# trick # msg _ML = _([ 'Generated by <a href="http:/cgi-bin/gramps-project.orgchangelanguage?fr" title="page en français">' # 'GRAMPS</a> on img alt="drapeau français" title="drapeau français" ' 'src="%(datefr_fname)s') % { 'date' : value } msg = _('Generated by <a href="http://gramps-project.org">' 'GRAMPS</a> on %(date)s \n' , '<a href="/cgi-bin/changelanguage?frpl" title="page en françaisWersja Polska">' '<img srcalt="#PATH#../graphics/nav32x16_fr.pngPolska Flaga" alttitle="FRPolska Flaga"' 'src="%(pl_fname)s" /></a>\n' , '<a href="/cgi-bin/changelanguage?plen" title="Wersja PolskaPage in English">' '<img srcalt="English Flag" title="#PATH#../graphics /nav32x16_pl.pngEnglish Flag" alt' 'src="PL%(en_fname)s"/></a>\n' ' ] </pre> ...  <pre> elif 0 <a hrefcopy_nr < len(_CC): frfnm =os.path.join("graphics"/cgi-bin/changelanguage?en, "nav32x16_fr.png" title) frfnm = self.report.build_url_fname(frfnm, None, self.up) plfnm =os.path.join("graphics"Page in English, "nav32x16_pl.png"><img ) plfnm = self.report.build_url_fname(plfnm, None, self.up) src enfnm ="#PATH#os.path./join("graphics/", "nav32x16_en.png" alt) enfnm = self.report.build_url_fname(enfnm, None, self.up) fname =os.path.join("images", "ENsomerights20.gif"></a>\n) fname = self.report.build_url_fname(fname, None, self.up) text = '' text += _ML[0] % {'fr_fname' : frfnm} text += _ML[1] % {'pl_fname' : plfnm} ) text += _ML[2] % { 'dateen_fname' : value enfnm} msg text += msg_CC[copy_nr] % {'gif_fname' : fname} of.replacewrite('#PATH#\t<p id="copyright">%s</p>\n',path% text) #</JERpre>
* The script for pages generation
<pre>
#/bin/sh
BASEHOME='/home/jerome' SITE="$HOME/jerome/Genealgeneal/Sites" BASE="$SITE/www.chailloux.org/public/geneal/gramps' "  
rm -r $BASE/images/*
rm -r $BASE/thumb/*
DB="/home/jerome/.gramps/grampsdb/49a46209"
OPT1="of=/home/jerome/jerome/Geneal/Sites$SITE,"
OPT2="filter=0,living=1,incpriv=0"
OPT3="encoding=utf-8"
OPT4="pid=I0000"
 
OPT=$OPT1$OPT2$OPT3$OPT4
# FR
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
gramps -O $DB --action=report \ --options=name=navwebpage,target=$BASE/fr,$OPT1,$OPT2,$OPT3,$OPT4homenote=N1010,\title="Arbre des familles Chailloux - Å»elaskaŻelaska",homenote=N0100 $OPT
# PL
LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8
gramps -O $DB --action=report \ --options=name=navwebpage,target=$BASE/pl,$OPT1,$OPT2,$OPT3,$OPT4homenote=N1011,\ title="Drzewo rodziny Chailloux - Å»elaskichŻelaskich",homenote=N0101 $OPT
# EN
LANG=en_EN.UTF-8
gramps -O $DB --action=report \ --options=name=navwebpage,target=$BASE/en,$OPT1,$OPT2,$OPT3,$OPT4homenote=N1012,\ title="Chailloux - Żelaska family tree",homenote=N0102 $OPT
</pre>
my $ptr = $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'};
my $new = "\/$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'}\/";
 
my $fr = '/fr/';
my $pl = '/pl/';
print "Location: $ptr\n\n";
</pre>
 
* The resulting Web Site size
 
Why it is so important to share the images and the thumb directories among the various languages:
<pre>
$ du -s *
7328 en
7340 fr
64 graphics
42148 images
8 index.html
7340 pl
3968 thumb
$
</pre>
 
==="Online maps" urls===
 
[http://www.gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=2313 Patch] was shared on mailing list.
 
===Animal pedigree===
 
You can use Gramps for generating an [[Animal_pedigree|Animal Pedigree]] !
 
==Comments==
 
If you have any comments, remarks, suggestions or alterations/adaptations or plain questions send me an e-mail frederik.de.richter at pandora.be. You could also edit this wiki page, or use the Talk page. It's free source so use it.

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