Familypedia

• Contributors: akirk
• Tags: genealogy, gedcom, family-tree, wiki, wp-app
• Requires at least: 6.0
• Requires PHP: 7.4
• Tested up to: 7.1
• Stable tag: 1.0.0
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later
• License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Like Wikipedia, but private and just for your family — stories and photos for every relative, compatible with other family tree apps via GEDCOM.

Description

Try Familypedia in WordPress Playground · Try it with demo data

Try it in OpenStation — the same app opened in desktop mode with the OpenStation plugin.

Familypedia turns your WordPress site into a private, Wikipedia-style encyclopedia about your family. Each relative gets their own page for their story and photos, and Familypedia builds the family calendar and birthday reminders automatically from the dates you enter.

It's also compatible with the family tree apps you may already use: Familypedia reads and writes GEDCOM files, the format used by Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gramps, and most other genealogy software. Import what you have and the tree becomes a starting point, not the project — so you can spend your time on the stories and photos a tree alone can't hold.

Under the hood, Familypedia is a WpApp version of Family Wiki, with two deliberate differences:

• People are a custom post type, not WordPress pages, so the family wiki does not take over the site it lives on.
• No Advanced Custom Fields. Facts are plain post meta, and they are edited by a form inside the app.

The whole wiki lives under one path, /familypedia/, rendered by the app's own templates rather than by the site's theme.

How editing works

Two halves, each where it belongs:

• The text about a person is written in the block editor in wp-admin, under Familypedia → People.
• The facts about a person — dates, places, parents, children, marriages — are edited in the app itself, at /familypedia/<name>/edit.

Relatives are entered by name. A name that matches somebody on the wiki becomes a link to them; one that does not is kept as plain text, so a grandmother can be recorded before anyone writes her page. Where two people share a name the picker offers each of them with their birth year.

Pages

Path	What it is
/familypedia/	The home page, laid out in the block editor
/familypedia/all	Everyone and every page, grouped by initial, with a search
/familypedia/<name>	A person, their infobox and their text
/familypedia/<name>/edit	The form for that person's facts
/familypedia/<name>/<page>	A page hung beneath a person
/familypedia/calendar	The family calendar, month by month
/familypedia/calendar/<month>	One month on its own
/familypedia/birthdays	Birthdays of the living
/familypedia/tree and /familypedia/tree/<name>	Descendant outlines
/familypedia/new	Add a person
/familypedia/new-page	Add a standalone page, with no person of its own

The calendar and birthday pages can be switched off in Settings → Familypedia.

The front page

The home page is a post, edited in the block editor under Familypedia → Front Page or from the Edit this page link at the foot of the page itself. It starts out holding the two blocks the page used to be built from — the highlights box and the recently updated list — so a family tree on the home page is a matter of adding the Family Tree block and choosing where the branch starts. A GEDCOM import offers to do that for you.

Emptying the post puts those two blocks back: the home page is never blank.

Roles and privacy

People use WordPress's page capabilities, so Editor and Administrator can edit them straight away. The plugin also adds Wiki User (can edit) and Wiki Editor (can also delete).

Everything under /familypedia/ requires a login; the rest of the site is left as it is.

Wiki links

Links in a person's text are resolved as the page is rendered: a link to somebody who exists points at their page in the app, one to somebody who does not is marked red and offers to create them, and a link that leaves the site is marked green.

GEDCOM import and export

Administrators import and export GEDCOM files on the app's own Import / Export page. An upload opens a review step, which leads with a button that takes the whole file — the usual answer, and one click above the table rather than a scroll through it. Below that you can pick individual entries or whole descendant subtrees instead.

The review step also offers to put the biggest branch on the front page as a family tree. It is ticked to begin with on a wiki that has nobody on it yet, where the import is the whole family, and left alone once the front page already draws a tree.

Importing runs a batch of the file per request and says how far it has got — people first, then the family records that link them — because a whole family is more than one page load should carry, and a form post that sits there for a minute looks the same as one that has died. Without JavaScript the form posts itself and does the lot in one go, as it did before.

Existing people are matched by a previously stored GEDCOM xref first, then by name — and where a birth year is known on both sides it has to agree, so one person is not overwritten by a namesake.

Blocks

Five blocks are available, in a person's text and on the front page alike:

• Family Tree — a descendant outline starting from one person.
• Family Calendar — every date on the wiki.
• Birthday Calendar — the birthdays of the living.
• Family Highlights — the person of the hour, and the dates coming up next.
• Recently Updated — the pages that changed last.

Static archives

With Static Archive installed, people are offered alongside posts and pages and are archived the way the app renders them: the infobox first, then the wiki text with its links resolved. The styles and the infobox toggle are inlined, so an archived page stands on its own.

The Markdown output lays the same facts out as a list rather than passing the infobox through the HTML converter, which would run every label into its value.

Static Archive files non-page post types as <year>/<post-type>-<id>, so people are archived by ID rather than by name. Changing that needs a filter in Static Archive itself.

Cross-wiki links

On WordPress multisite you can link related family wikis from the same network in Settings → Familypedia. When the same person exists on both, the infobox shows an Also on row; when a local link is missing, a peer wiki is checked before it is marked red. Add a slug mapping when the two wikis use different slugs for the same person.

Relationship to Family Wiki

The two plugins share most of their logic, and Familypedia's GEDCOM handling, calendar, infobox, biography, tree and static-archive support are ports of Family Wiki's. Both are GPL-2.0-or-later.

Two bugs were fixed along the way and are worth carrying back:

• The exporter wrote one family record for a couple's marriage and another for the same couple as a child's parents. Re-importing then overwrote the dated marriage with the undated one.
• The exporter handed out fresh I1, I2… xrefs instead of writing back the xref each person was imported with, so re-importing its own export created a second copy of everyone who had come from an earlier GEDCOM.

They are not meant to run on the same site: Family Wiki keeps people in pages, Familypedia keeps them in its own post type, and nothing migrates between the two automatically. A GEDCOM export from one imports into the other.

Development happens on GitHub. Pull requests and issues are welcome there.

Installation

1. Upload the familypedia directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, or install the plugin through the Plugins screen in WordPress.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
3. Visit /familypedia/ on your site to open the wiki, and add your first relative with Add a person.
4. If you already keep a family tree elsewhere, export it as a GEDCOM file and import it on the app's Import / Export page instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this take over my whole site?

No. People are stored in the plugin's own custom post type and the wiki is rendered under a single path, /familypedia/, by the plugin's own templates. The rest of the site — its pages, posts and theme — is left exactly as it was.

Who can see the family wiki?

Everything under /familypedia/ requires a login. Beyond the built-in Editor and Administrator roles, the plugin adds Wiki User, who can edit people, and Wiki Editor, who can also delete them.

Can I import my existing family tree?

Yes. Familypedia reads GEDCOM, the interchange format written by Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gramps and most other genealogy software. An upload opens a review step where you can take the whole file, or pick individual people or whole descendant subtrees. It exports GEDCOM again, so nothing is locked in.

Does re-importing my own export duplicate everybody?

No. Each person keeps the GEDCOM xref they were imported with, and the export writes it back out. On import, people are matched by that xref first and by name second — and where a birth year is known on both sides it has to agree, so a namesake is never overwritten.

Does it need Advanced Custom Fields or any other plugin?

No. Facts about a person are stored as ordinary post meta and edited by a form inside the app. Static Archive is supported if you have it, but nothing requires it.

Can I run several family wikis on one network?

Yes. On WordPress multisite, related wikis can be linked to each other in Settings → Familypedia: the infobox then shows an Also on row for a person who exists on both, and a link that has no local match is looked up on a peer wiki before it is marked as missing.

Where do I write a person's story?

In the block editor in wp-admin, under Familypedia → People. The dates, places and relationships are edited separately, in the app itself, at /familypedia/<name>/edit.

Screenshots

1. The wiki's front page: a descendant tree of the family beside the highlights box, with the person of the hour and the dates coming up next.
2. A person's page: the biography beside a facts box of birth, death, spouse and children, each name linking on to its own page.

Changelog

1.0.0

• First release.
• Wikipedia-style pages for each relative under a single /familypedia/ path, rendered by the plugin's own templates.
• People stored in a custom post type, with facts as post meta edited by a form inside the app.
• GEDCOM import with a review step, batched over several requests, and GEDCOM export that preserves xrefs.
• Family calendar, birthday list, descendant tree outlines and an alphabetical index of everyone.
• Five blocks: Family Tree, Family Calendar, Birthday Calendar, Family Highlights and Recently Updated.
• Block-editor front page, login-gated wiki pages and the Wiki User and Wiki Editor roles.
• Cross-wiki links between related family wikis on a multisite network.
• Static Archive support for archiving people as they are rendered.