Ancestor Cafe

I can see it now… “yet another genealogy social network appears”.  Ok, here’s the deal!  Like all of you I’m a registered user of just about all of the free genealogy sites and networks out there (and a few pay ones, don’t tell my wife).  Some of them I like, some I dislike, then there are others that I don’t even see the point of.  My problem is that none of them seem to do everything that want them to do!  I’ve toyed with the idea of designing simple websites in the past so I have basic idea about how this all works.  (I even had a really nice TNG family history site until hackers defaced it and deleted it.)

About a week I decided to see what I could throw together.  My vision included a few key ingredients.  It had to be capable of creating a social networking environment (almost mandatory these days), allow for user blogs and most important of all… a wiki!!!  Why isn’t there a genealogy wiki out there?  Am I just missing it?  I use wikipedia almost everyday for looking things up, it just seems logical that there would be a wiki for genealogical use considering how almost everything in genealogy is connected to each other.  Imagine if rootsweb was originally built as a wiki instead of compilation of individual websites (with tons of broken links).  Don’t get me wrong, the contribution rootsweb has provided is and will be unmatched for quite some time.  I just think we need something better.  (Don’t know what a “wiki” is?  click here!)

So what is AncestorCafe?  AncestorCafe is a collection of “open source” or free software linked together to make an interactive genealogy website that is as simple or complex as you want it to be.  The best aspect of open source software (other than the cost) is the large number of people constantly building plug-ins and extensions to make the software more customizeable and feature rich.  There are three main components:

WordPress – arguably the best blogging software available

BuddyPress – this is actually a plug-in for WordPress that transforms the blog into a social network

MediaWiki – “is a free software wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia.”  (taken directly from their website.)

AncestorCafe is not backed by any corporation.  It’s just an idea I had, so I decided to throw it out there and see what people think.  Thanks for stopping by!  More to come…