How does this program compare to PHPGedView

[Anonymous]

How does this program compare to PHPGedView http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net/index.php

I do not know a lot about these kinds of programs and am trying to decide which program to use. The problem is for Internet use there is not a lot of choice. It looks like this one has only one developer, which PHPGedView has a whole team of developers behind it. Does anyone have any suggestions. Because once you get started it would be difficult to start over with something else.

[JGilhousen]

I have run tests of both scripts on our Family Association website to provide a user interface to our central genealogical database of 5,000+ individual records.

Comparing the two is difficult outside of the context of just what kind of site it is going to be hosted on, and for what purpose. It is further complicated by the fact that a new version of phpGedView has been released recently, while a new release of TUFaT is promised soon, which will render such analysis obsolete.

That said, putting a side-by-side look at the two in a nutshell, I would have to say that pGV has a more comprehensive feature set, and is probably the best bet for serious presentation of a "scholarly" genealogy project, by a single compiler, or a small group of collaborators.

For a user-friendly, visually appealing family-oriented genealogy site, or for a site intended to provide a vehicle for casual users to build their own small family tree files, TUFaT would be the way to go, hands down.

At this stage of the development of each program, some experience with troubleshooting installation problems will probably be necessary with either choice. Peculiarities of my hosting provider's server configuration thwarted automatic installation in both cases, and neither script is provided with what I would consider much more than marginal documentation.

The team approach to the development of phpGedView is a two-edged sword. It has enabled them to provide a rich set of features, but the modules don't always fit together the way they should, and sometimes it is difficult to figure out whose work has created problems when they arise. Some of the "bug reports" on the pGV site seem to have laid dormant for months, without being addressed.

On the other hand, TUFaT is a huge undertaking for its developer, and at five dollars per license, it appears to me that some users are unreasonable in their expectations of prompt and thorough support.

There is one feature which we need for our site, which is not available in the current release of TUFaT, and rather than hold our project up while awaiting the new release, we opted to go ahead and switch over to phpGedView. It passed beta testing on the site with flying colors, and has functioned well for over six weeks of intensive use. Some of its bugs have necessitated our putting on our thinking caps, and crafting some rather inelegant workarounds, so if you need something that you can run without ever having to manually edit a gedcom, or one of its component php scripts, stay away from phpGedView.

I am looking forward to the new release of TUFaT, because I would still like to use it to add a "create your own family tree" feature to our site.

That's my take on the two scripts, for what it's worth.

J-M +

P.S. You can see our installation of phpGedView running at http://tree.gilhousens.net