Back in November I mentioned my idea for a lightweight record manager, and here’s a mockup of what I think it’ll look like:

It’ll be very, very simple. Basically, there’ll be a small set of metadata for each person (the name, gender, and birthdate, as you can see in its own box), and then a wiki page where the user can enter whatever they want. It’ll use Textile for the editing (and to edit, you’ll just click on the wiki area, I think). There’ll be a modification to link to other people in the database (the green links) and to non-people pages (the red Anson County link). Other than that and a basic search, the only other feature (for now) will be the history tab, which keeps track of revisions.

And that’s it. It won’t take too long to put together, really. I’m not going to worry about GEDCOM import or pedigree charts or anything just yet — I’ll stick with the bare minimum, to ensure that this actually happens. :) The idea is to let the user organize their data the way they want to. To get out of the way, in other words. Not everyone wants that, of course, but I think it has the potential to be a very good thing. We’ll see if I’m right. :)

Oh, I upgraded to Rails 1.2 earlier but it didn’t work for some reason, so I’m reinstalling and hoping that it’ll decide to cooperate. If not, I may write the prototype in Python/Django instead.

As for the name, I figured I can’t keep calling everything Beyond. :)

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy, family history

Posted in Design
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