Apr 21 2010
TNG – The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding Review
While I enjoy the wiki platform I’ve been using for my online ancestry project, I thought I would try out some genealogy sitebuilding software and see how it worked out. So this week I purchased TNG for $29.99 and have been trying it out.
It definitely has some aesthetic appeal that my wiki doesn’t have with eight attractive templates to choose from, and I must say their rounded rectangles make for a much smoother tree than my dashes and plus signs. But I’m afraid that’s where that benefits over the wiki end. I had thought that since this was a database driven application (using PHP and MySQL) that it would make connections easily. I thought I could enter a person, enter their parents, and then they would show up in the tree that way. But so far, and I may be missing something here, it has not been so easy. I entered a child, the child’s parents, and one of the parent’s parents and then went to the tree section of the site hoping they would appear there (at least in some form – maybe a message saying”‘hey, look at me, do I belong in the tree?’”), but they didn’t. And furthermore, when I went to enter them, it asked me to enter their relationships once again. To add insult to injury, I often got an endlessly spinning circle or a frozen screen when trying to add members. So in essence, I was hoping for something that has the ease of Ancestry.com, but got a very janky app. instead.
Another thing that bothered me was the security, or rather the lack of; I went to the site from a new computer and it was already logged in to the admin area :S
In all fairness, they do have a large support forum, testimonials that boast of fantastic customer service, and FAQ’s to help you along the way, but why can’t it be more intuitive from the start?
Also, there are a few things I don’t like about the templates that I would really need to customize. For instance, I really like how my wiki site has everything you’d want to know about a person on that person’s page, including their bio, tree segment, and photo gallery. To have this in TNG I would have to do some heavy customizations to the template(s).
So I will work with it some more to see if it’s what I really want, but it’s not the genealogy platform that I’ve been dreaming of.
I use TNG and have no issues with security. Not sure why you were “logged-in” from a previously unknown machine. I have tested this program on many computers and I have never seen this.
As a matter of fact, I use them because of the ability to hide (on a granular level) private information and entire families. It did take a few passes at setting the rights in the interface to get the desired level of privacy, but with the constant support of Darrin and his team, my site is JUST how I want it.
Now I will start changing the interface and colors to get the look I want. This took a little getting used to, and I failed to save the changed files before I updated a few times (causing me to start over), but once I gained familiarity, I loved it.
Darrin is always willing to discuss and fix problems and I am posting this reply because I think he deserves the recognition. Never met the guy, but I certainly owe him lunch!!
Fred Berardi recently posted..Individual: Private (I2076)