Frontend for Gramps Web
This release introduces the Revision History view, which allows to browse all changes – additions, deletions, edits – of the tree, regardless who made them. For each edit transaction, you can see which user made the change, when they made it, and what exactly was changed.
This implements a long standing feature request and should make the collaborative editing experience much more pleasant and robust.
One of the next releases will even allow to selectively revert individual changes!
The non-standard tag v24.4.40 was created by accident. The next release will be v24.5.0.
This release brings a great new feature: the Relationship Graph, implemented by @geostag!
Zoomable and scrollable like the ancestor, descendant, and hourglass charts, the relationship chart not only displays ancestors or descendants of a person, but all people related to the center person with a defined maximum degree of separation.
So you can finally browse an interactive chart showing your siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles & more all at the same time!
This release adds a new feature available to tree owners: they can now delete all objects in a tree, or optionally only objects of a specific type. It a requires a user to have logged in recently; otherwise, the password needs to be re-entered. This is to add an additional layer of security.
This release is a pure maintenance release without new features, but plenty of updated translations.
This release is compatible with the newly released Gramps 5.2 and Gramps Web API 2.0.
When you upgrade (see the upgrade guide at https://www.grampsweb.org/setup/v2/ and don't forget to back up your tree!), you will be presented with a screen allowing you to upgrade your database to the new Gramps 5.2 schema.
This release drastically improves the experience for long-running background tasks. In the past, only an indeterminate spinner was shown. Now, a circular progress bar is shown and a tooltip provides more information, like the progress percentage and, in some cases, details about the current step. Even more, you can now switch the view, or even close and reopen the browser window, and the progress bar will be shown and updated automatically!
For the release notes see https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps-web/releases/tag/v24.2.0
The highlight in this release is the addition of the "check & repair database tool". This can be helpful when you are encountering corrupted objects or similar issues with your Gramps database - it is based on the same checks and repairs also performed by the check & repair database tool in Gramps desktop. You can find the button in the administration settings.
The "import" view for importing genealogical data or media files has been moved to the administration settings, since it is anyway only relevant for users with "owner" permissions. The user management has been split into a separate tab in the settings view.
Two improvements have been made specifically for users struggling with missing media files. The new "media file status" widget in the administration settings (just below the new location of the "import media archive" button) shows the total number of media objects in the database, the number of media objects with missing files, and the number of media objects with missing checksum (stemming e.g. from importing a GEDCOM file with media).
So far, broken images caused by missing media files where simply invisible in the frontend, making it difficult to find them, since they would not show up in media galleries. Now, a default "broken image" placeholder is shown for any missing media file.
A new feature has been added to filter the places in the map view, optionally only showing places related to events. This can be useful for users who have many places without events in their database, e.g. exported from external systems like GOV.
The Gramps Web demo has been broken for some time. We now added a new one at https://demo.grampsweb.org. Existing users are owner, editor, contributor, and member, all password being the same as the user names.
The ancestor fan chart is very useful to show a large number of ancestors in a single graph - while it displays 4 ancestor generations by default, you can easily make it show 10 or more generations with more than a thousand ancestors.
This release adds a powerful new feature: you can now color the ancestors in the fan chart by various properties! As of this release, this includes the number of events or notes associated with the person, the birth or death year, the age at death, the last name of the person, their religion, and finally their "ancestor frequency", i.e. the number of times they show up in the graph (> 1 in case of pedigree collapse).
For those who like keyboard shortcuts, no less than 10 new ones have been added in this release (display them by typing ?)! They all start with n for "new" and take you directly to the page for creating a new object. Want to upload a media file? Just type n + m and the form is there.
The original name of the Github repository, Gramps.js, was perceived as confusing to users and, after some discussion (#334), we have decided to rename the repository simply to gramps-web, since it is about the frontend of the application users know as "Gramps Web". In the documentation, we refer to the Javascript application as "Gramps Web frontend" instead of Gramps.js now. The backend is still called Gramps Web API and still lives in a different repository, slighty renamed from gramps-webapi to gramps-web-api for consistency.
Happy 2024!
The first new release of the year mainly improves the data entry workflow. So far, creating a new person and adding a source citation to it required two separate steps: first creating the person and then opening edit mode and associating the citation. This can be cumbersome when adding a large number of new objects; moreover, good genealogy practice means no objects should be added without corresponding source.
The following improvements have been made to the forms for adding new objects:
In addition and as usual, translations have been updated by the diligent Weblate community.