For those of you out there interested in seeing a genealogy site built using ‘mostly’ WordPress, please visit ManyRoads.  Obviously the site is one of mine (my family genealogy).  However, I think it provides a pretty decent example of what you can do to slice and dice a ‘bunch’ of information into a ‘pretty useful’ format.

I have tried to use a plugin for the genealogy database backend (TNG).  Security remains a problem for that plugin, in that it does not work for me.  However I do have a single set of logins between the two systems and databases when used in the manner seen on the site. As is likely obvious, the ManyRoads site uses a large number of plugins including (Revised list as of 29 January 2010):

• Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.
• All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist
• AStickyPostOrderER - AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with pagination of post lists.
• AVH First Defense Against Spam - This plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before content is served.
• Bad Behavior - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
• Category Order- The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.
• cforms- cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more. Please see ____HISTORY.txt for what’s new and current bugfixes.
• Collapsing Blogroll- Output the built-in blogroll where the shortcode [collroll] is placed in the post/page. The categories can be collapsed.
• Count Per Day- Counter, shows reads per page; today, yesterday, last week, last months … on dashboard and widget.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator- Generates a fully customizable sitemap
• EG-Series- Better organize and highlight your posts by grouping them into series.
• Enhanced Links- Allows to get better control over the links listing. Also provides a widget view of the links. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
• Enhanced Recent Posts- A plugin for wordpress which enhances the built-in “Recent Posts” widget. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
• Exclude Pages from Navigation- Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
• Flexi Pages Widget- A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
• Global Post Password- Enables you to define a global password for all password-protected posts. Click here to change the password.
• Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
• Hana Flv Player- The best way to embed Flash Player and Flash movie in your WordPress Blog. Includes GPL Flowplayer and OS FLV player. Usage: [hana-flv-player video='/source_video.flv' /]
• Hungred Feature Post List- This plugin is design for hungred.com and people who face the same problem! Please visit the plugin page for more information.
• Just One Category- On a category’s archive page do not show posts from that category’s children categories unless those posts are also a member of the original category in question. Based on Front Page Categories by Ryan Boren.
• List category posts- List Category Posts allows you to list posts from a category into a post/page using the [catlist] shortcode. This shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can use [catlist] as many times as needed with different arguments. Usage: [catlist argument1=value1 argument2=value2].
• My Page Order- My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.
• NextGEN Gallery- A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.
• OpenBook- Displays a book’s cover image, title, author, and other book data from Open Library.
• p2pConverter- This plugin allows you to easily convert a post to a page and vice versa through an easy to use interface. You may either click on your Manage tab in Administration, and you will see a Convert option under Posts and Pages sub-tabs, or click Convert while editing a post or page in the bottom right side bar. A p2pConverter role capability prevents unwanted users from converting pages (i.e. only Administrators and Editors have this ability), which can be adjusted by using a Role Manager plugin.
• Page Links To- Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.
• pageMash- Manage your multitude of pages with pageMash’s slick drag-and-drop style, ajax interface. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organising of parenting.
• PollDaddy Polls- Create and manage PollDaddy polls and ratings in WordPress
• RB Internal Links- Link to other blog posts and pages without specifying the full URL. Uses a UI to ease finding the post or page you want to link to.
• Redirection- Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors
• Secure WordPress- Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.
• SEO Smart Links- SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
• SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam- Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. Also is WPMU and BuddyPress compatible. Settings | Donate
• SidebarTabs- sidebarTabs allows you to easily widgets into Tabs
• Simple Tags- Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !
• Snazzy Archives- Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site which creates completely unique archive pages.
• Social Bookmarks- Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. Use the plugin options under Dashboard > Social to configure it.
• Subpage Listing- Displays a directory-like listing of subpages where <!–%subpages%–> exists in the content of pages. It will be displayed if a page is blank. txfx_wp_subpages() can be used to display subpages in the sidebar. See this plugin’s site for details.
• TNG WordPress Integration- Integrates TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy) with WordPress.
• Topsy Retweet Button- Provides a Twitter retweet button powered by Topsy.
• TreeMagic-Cypress- Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible
• Visitor Maps and Who’s Online- Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online. Includes a Who’s Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. No API key needed. Settings | Donate
• WordPress Download Monitor- Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. If you are upgrading Download Monitor it is a good idea to back-up your database first just in case. You may need to re-save your permalink settings after upgrading if your downloads stop working.
• WP-phpMyAdmin- Provides phpMyAdmin from the WordPress admin console
• WP-PostViews- Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. Modified by David Potter to include options for when and where to display view counts.
• WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• wp-scanner activator- This Plugin adds <!- wpscanner -> to enable wp-scanner to scan your blog.
• WP-SpamFree- An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.
• WP Render Blogroll Links- Outputs your Blogroll links to a Page or Post. Add [wp-blogroll] to a Page or Post and all your WordPress links/Blogrolls will be rendered. This extremely simple plug-in enables you to create your own Links page without having to write a custom template.The output can easily be styled with CSS. Each category with its links is encapsulated in a DIV with a classname called “linkcat”. All the links are attributed with the class “brlink”.
• WP to Twitter- Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.
• YD Zoomify- This WordPress plugin allows for simple insertion of a Zoomify zoomable web image in a post content, page or template.

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Earlier I made some modifications to a WP-plugin for Drop-Down Menus.  I have placed the cleaned up code on this site for any/all to use. You should find it in the Downloads are.

The original plugin is: Copyright 2007 – Zoute snor

css cleaned up and validated by Mark Rabideau — 26 Nov 2007

All rights reserved by Zoute snor. You are free to use this software and redistribute it for free but may not include it in any commercial distribution without prior written permission.

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TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
The plugin can be configured to any external Internet website, as well as connecting to your own data, or network. TreeMagic Cypress is available as a free download from the downloads section of this site

The popup has a list of links that is configurable from the plugin administration section. The idea is that when you double click or select a group of words on a page, the popup is invoked adjacent to the word(s) allowing you to rapidly select a web site from the list. Typical examples of this are search engines, Wikipedia, Refdesk and similar knowledge-base sites. After selecting a site, the word(s) you have selected become part of a search string that returns results in a smaller separate popup window. You can of course keep your query results ‘on site’ such as searching your own content, help files or related resources. Because the query URLs are completely configurable in administration, you have total control over the searches, including opening the results page in a resized new window or using the existing target.

TreeMagic Cypress is not new technology and utilizes a small javascript and css to provide the fastest possible way to show extended meaning, content and relationship for text on a page. Once installed every text word on your site, that is not a hyperlink is potentially active. It does not interfere with any other mouse click functions and is totally unintrusive in use. Installation is simple, via a standard WordPress plugin. There are no database changes and the plugin adds negligible overhead to your HTML.

The broad concept is to provide the visitor greater freedom to take diversions from interesting cues in the text, but not taking them from your site in the process. Too many turns in the road and too many temptations to explore, can take your focus away from the content on a page. Most of us have come to realize that it is all too easy to be a ‘browser butterfly’ taking detours from hyperlinks and searches that often leave you marooned and lost in hyperspace. TreeMagic Cypress addresses the need to explore and supplement page content from other resources, but keeps your visitors safely focused on your website.

Searches can be configured for anything from a dictionary definition, translations, image searches to a full blown encyclopedia expositions. Following further links within the results ‘new window’ allows readers to explore in a separate browser page, while keeping your website in view when they want to return. Because we use a new window to display content, all your usual browser tools are available such as page saves and bookmarking your excursions for future returns.

As a web master, you have a simple administration interface that gives options for adding and deleting your website search strings, also the results window target and size. We have included a few samples to get you started, but the choice is up to you to provide the most suitable supplementary content for your website. There are numerous types of applications available for this tool and because you can manage your own reference links, you can offer a variety of offsite or internal content. All you need to do is track down your reference site and discover the correct query string.

Some typical examples of sites are as follows:

Google search
–Images
–News
–Maps
Wikipedia search
Currency converter
whois /IP lookup
answers.com
dictionary.com
Clusty.com
Translation
–en-fr
–en-ge
–en-it
Currency conversions
–£-$
–$-£
Navigation
–Home
–Contact us
–Help!
–Site map
–Site search

Do you need TreeMagic Cypress?

One of the main considerations with WordPress is choosing carefully which plugins to use. Too many and your website can suffer with decreased performance. Because of the tiny script footprint, this plugin will not add any significant processing burden to the database or page loads. It’s simple to use and will add some great features to your web page texts with the minimum of setup. The features and benefits are only limited by your imagination.

Download here …

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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