BFD Calendar

In my Filemaker setup I have only two databases, one for events and one for people. When I check a record for someone in the people database I can see all related events in a 'portal'. That makes it very easy to check if some event was added or not. Most input fields are popup menus or lists that also make it convenient to see if something was added or not. Until now every event and person has a unique 'Filemaker' ID that I can import into the ProcessWire pages. That can keep everything together for a start. From here on I just have to find out a new automatically adding ID or a search for the last entries and I'm done. For the website I would add a 'places' category because I often end up with clicking "New York", "New York", "USA" for a lot of events. And yes, I do enjoy finding new events to add once in a while. Now I'm the only one enjoying searches and weird coincidences in my Filemaker database, but I'd like to share that joy to others as well.

Thank you for your insights all. I'll let them sink in and start a little sample site to see where it goes. Regarding searches, I'd be happy if I could have pre-defined search criteria like the Skyscrapers site for a start, before attempting to serve the most complex demands. I'd definitely want a separate category for places because they do look great on a Google Map. They could very well function as a 'places to visit' when you're on holiday. Compared to the 1980s it's now also much easier to find out what happened 'exactly' where. So basically there would be three main categories to start with: events, people, places? Places would be the easiest because there's always only one place in one city in one state in one country. People a bit more complex because they can have more than one 'profession'. And events being the most complex, not just to categorise but also to retrieve linked information from people (with more than one possible) as well as places.

The background is a 1980s photocopy enlargement of a computer data file on film. I never knew what information was held there.... Readability could be a bit of a problem indeed. The old Calendars were just typed with a typewriter from written information in a notebook, pre-computer age. Later on I switched to a Commodore 64 computer with cassettes to store data, then I moved to a FoxPro database and finally to a Filemaker database. The old Calendars are collector's items now. http://www.en.zvab.com/advancedSearch.do?title=Birth+Fact+Death+Calendar&author=Devos

The dates are not my biggest concern, I can easily export them from Filemaker as three fields (dd, mm and yyyy) and use php to calculate the 'years ago'. Exporting to csv and importing into ProcessWire also works like a charm, I already tested with the 4000 names. I understand that this needs careful planning. It's a bit confusing to decide what should be main categories with parent and child pages. I have the impression you can go on in dividing data almost endless. A major doubt right now is to decide if 'events' should be categorised by date (parent=month -> child=1,2,3,.... -> child=event1959a, event1959b, event1969a, event1983a,....) or by event (parent=event -> child=birth, fact, death -> child=event). In the last case it's possible to keep categorising forever. For instance deaths can be split up in say cause, suicide and murder. Then again cause can be split up in heart attack, stroke,.... But in the end they should all show up in pages listing events resulting from user searches like "what happened on my birthday?", "which musicians were born in my hometown?" or "who was murdered by an axe in Belgium?".

Is it possible in ProcessWire to 'construct' a text output from fields on different pages in different categories that are linked by a relational ID as in a relational database? Sample of text output: 495 YEARS AGO - on Sunday 29 September 1518 (+) Artist Tintoretto originally Jacopo Comin aka Il Furioso, is born in Venice, Italy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Where "495 years ago" is calculated from the date field in the 'event' page (the one that gathers information from other 'related' pages), "Artist", "Tintoretto", "Jacopo Comin" and "Il Furioso" are fields (occupation, lastname, original, alias,....) in a 'name' page, and "Venice" and "Italy" are fields in a 'location' page. The 'name' and 'location' pages would all have a unique ID linked to the 'event' page (with a unique ID as well) to get the related fields. This would also allow the page "Tintoretto" to list all 'event' pages that are related to Tintoretto and the page "Venice, Italy" to list all the events that happened in Venice. The data is now stored in a Filemaker database and I'm looking for a convenient solution to transfer it to a website. In the meantime a html-export version can be found at http://www.birthfactdeathcalendar.net. There are over 10000 events and 4000 names. The 'Scyscrapers' sample website comes close to what I'm after but when digging in deeper I guess I need some extra skills in defining what goes where (categorisation) and how to bring it together (relation). Any help or guidance is mostly welcomed.

I have a likely question, in a quite practical manner. Say I have a list of names that includes a John Smith where every name has a page with some general information and one or more pictures. And I have a list of events that happened to all the people in my list of names, when they were born, when they got their drivers license, when they got married, etc... After I added maybe 32 pages or more about John Smith I find out that his last name is not Smith but Smit. Instead of searching for all event pages relating to John Smith and changing his name to Smit it would be easy to just update the one page about John Smith in my list of names and have all other pages with stuff that happened to John Smith get his name from there and thus get updated automatically.