COLLEEN ROBLEDO Web Developer | Librarian | Researcher | Genealogist

I've been playing around the past week with my new license to TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding) to run my family history site, as a replacement to my previous home-grown PHP/MySQL application. So, far I absolutely love the program.

It's entirely web-based, all I had to do was FTP the files to my host server, then configure the database through installation interface, configure my site settings, and upload my latest gedcom export. I planned to build my own PHP and HTML templates, but started spending a couple days just trying to decide on a site design (not my strength), so I opted to just modify one of the available templates instead... again, forcing myself to stop trying to reinvent the wheel every time, just because I "can". The program supports full user access control, too, so I can now allow relatives to login and contribute to our common lineage branch as well.

My only disappointment so far is not actually with TNG, but with the plugins to integrate it with the Drupal content content management system I use as a platform for this web site.

The documentation indicates the plugin provides a seamless login between the two sites, and displays the TNG content through the Drupal CMS. The seamless login worked great for me, but I am not happy with the content display. I had hoped the plugin would work more like the Gallery2 module for Drupal, displaying TNG content as actual nodes. Instead, the plugin simply displays my TNG content within an iframe. I abhor iframes! The iframe output makes it impossible for users to navigate forward or backward through TNG content with browser buttons, and makes it impossible for me to link to specific TNG pages from any of my Drupal content and still have that content page display within my CMS.

So, since the plugin didn't really suit my particular needs, I opted to just go with a completely separate standalone site and design for my TNG application.