PhpGedView is a free, collaborative genealogy program that allows you to view and edit your genealogy online. PhpGedView has full editing capabilities, full privacy controls and support linking to multimedia files such as images and videos. Your latest genealogy information is always available online for others to see.

PhpGedView was created by John Finlay.

Traditionally, you run a genealogy program on your home computer and enter all the information you collect. Several people (possibly located around the world) may be doing exactly the same thing. At some point you may find you have links to each others trees and you go ahead and update your tree with this new information. There are several problems with this:

  1. You have to enter all the data yourself. This can be:
    • Time consuming
    • Error prone
    • If there is a lot of information, it can be difficult to decide which data to add and which to leave out
  2. Relying on other researchers to update you on their progress is optimistic because:
    • They may not have the time or willingness to keep more than one or two people updated
    • They have to guess what changes would be of interest to you
    • They may forget what changes to inform you about
  3. Several people duplicating the exact same records is a waste of resources, time and money. Why not work together in a collaborative environment!?

Traditional genealogy programs will allow you to generate HTML pages that can be uploaded to your website and viewed by anyone.

However, there are several problems with this:

  1. The website becomes outdated as you add new information to the tree on your computer
  2. The web pages produced are usually static and thus don’t allow useful features like searching for people
  3. You may need to handle many thousands of HTML files and the multimedia files they link to
  4. When you update a small section of your tree, you have to upload the whole set of HTML pages again
  5. All pages are viewable by the whole world, so you may need to worry about privacy issues
  6. This approach is not scalable to trees containing large numbers of people

PhpGedView as the Solution

PhpGedView solves these problems by keeping your genealogy data online and allowing you to edit it. Pages and reports are generated dynamically, so your website is always up-to-date. It also means that data can be searched, making it easy to find the information you are looking for.