phpGedView

Who are my ancestors? Where did they live? Do I have royalty in my blood? If these questions are of interest to you, phpGedView will come in handy.

This tutorial is made for phpGedView version 3.2.1, but may also work for newer versions. You are advised to also read the readme.txt file that comes with phpGedView.

With phpGedView you are able to keep track of all the information about your family you have collected. Birthdates, relationships, photos and much more. PhpGedView is able to import from the standard gedcom format that most genealogy clients are able to produce, so you don't even have to type in your existing data.

Install phpGedView from the ports collection:

cd /usr/ports/www/phpgedview/
make install clean

When finished, you'll find phpgedview in /usr/local/www/phpGedView

Tell your webserver where to find it. Here is an example for Apache:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@example.tld
DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/phpGedView
ServerName family.example.tld
ServerAlias family.example.tld
ErrorLog /usr/local/www/logs/family.example.tld-error.log
CustomLog /usr/local/www/logs/family.example.tld-access.log common
</VirtualHost>

Remember to edit any paths and domain names in the above example to fit your server setup.

Make copies of the example configurations:

cd /usr/local/www/phpGedView/
cp config.php-dist config.php
cp config_gedcom.php-dist config_gedcom.php
cp config_download.php-dist config_download.php
cp authentication_mysql.php-dist authentication_mysql.php
cp authentication_index.php-dist authentication_index.php

Configuration is done via your browser, and therefore the www user must have write permissions during the configuration:

cd /usr/local/www/phpGedView/
chmod 777 config.php

You probably have som media files (pictures etc.) related to your data. To be able to upload those files, the media, and media/thumbs directories, must be writable:

cd /usr/local/www/phpGedView/
chmod 777 media
chmod 777 media/thumbs

Connect to your mysql server and create the database along with a user/password to access it (you can use phpGedView without a database, but that isn't covered here):

mysql -u myuser -p
Password:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE phpgedview;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT USAGE ON * . * TO 'phpgedview'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> GRANT CREATE, SELECT , INSERT , UPDATE , DELETE ON `phpgedview` . * TO 'phpgedview'@'localhost';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

You're finished ... Now you can point your browser to your phpGedView. A configuration page will automatically appear. Just follow the instructions to get started.

Official phpGedView webpage

Exporting data from a client

I use Gramps to edit my data. Then once in a while I use the 'Export' feature to create a gedcom file for phpGedView:

To export from Gramps I do the following:

1. File -> Export
2. Forward
3. Choose GEDCOM as the format to save, then press Forward
4. GEDCOM export options:
   Encoding: UNICODE
   Filter: Entire Database
   Target: GEDCOM 5.5 standard
   Copyright: Standard Copyright
   Do not include records marked private (checked)
   Restrict data on living people (unchecked)
   Use Living as first name (unchecked)
   Exclude notes (unchecked)
   Exclude sources (unchecked)
   Reference images from path: media (checked)
   ... then press Forward
5. Choose where to save, then press Forward
6. Press OK

I always use the same filename for the resulting *.ged file. That way the old file is always overwritten.

In the Reference images from path options I wrote "media". This is the name of the folder where images and other media files are kept in phpGedView. So the first thing I do is placing any images in phpGedView/media on the server. The corresponding thumbnails must be named exactly as the originals and placed in phpGedView/media/thumbs.

After that I login with my admin account, then goto admin.php and click "Manage Gedcoms and Edit Privacy" -> "Upload Gedcom".

Then it's just a matter of following the instructions and confirm when asked to overwrite the existing *.ged file.