Page hierarchy / template strategy for genealogical info?

[MarcC]

I'm creating a family history website, and after looking at the software available for the purpose (I'd have to remove a lot of things I don't need), decided to see how ProcessWire might be used for this.

I don't really need a formal family tree structure in the back end as long as I can figure out a reasonably good fit for indicating family relations.

Right now I have a flat grouping of pages for individuals under a page for each family name. I was thinking I could indicate parents, children and spouses via page fields. Can anybody see obvious flaws in this, or give me an idea of an alternative? I just couldn't think of a way of getting away from using page fields to indicate things like spouses, even if I used the page tree to indicate children.

I don't want to get too serious about replicating a genealogy app because I don't need all of the crazy features those have, but I would like to be able to at least display hierarchichal family data on the front end.

Thanks for any ideas!

[renobird]

Hey Marc,

Page fields seem like a great fit for this. I'll be interested to hear how you end up pulling it all together.

[diogo]

Today I stumbled on this (css3 only) family tree http://thecodeplayer.com/walkthrough/css3-family-tree. It still doesn't support marriages, but the creator says he is working on it.

I don't know if this can be useful to you, but it's a nice curiosity

[ryan]

Sounds like you are on the right track with this Marc. I think PW should be a great way to construct a family tree. I agree that a Page reference would be the best way to identify any relations that don't follow the parent-child structure.

[MarcC]

Thanks, guys. I'll move forward with the page refs and see where that gets me. Diogo, this CSS tree is pretty cool!