Title: Keeping Family History with WordPress
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: August 31, 2022
Last modified: October 26, 2023

---

# Keeping Family History with WordPress

August 31, 2022

One thing that I like very much about my family is the anecdotes and stories. One
thing that I am bad at, is reciting them.
So I had this idea to create something
like a private [Wikipedia](https://wikipedia.org/) for my family, where each person
has their own page and family members can contribute to the stories, biographical
data, and media.

Initially, I set up a [MediaWiki](https://www.mediawiki.org/), i.e. the same software
that Wikipedia uses. It turns out, it’s not that easy to configure. The new Wiki
editor is much better than directly editing wiki syntax but the complexity is high
for a small project like that. Also, uploading media is quite a pain because of 
the importance of licensing metadata. In a private wiki, you’ll want the UI to get
out of the way.

So, since I work with [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/) a lot, I had the idea 
to use WordPress for it. There are a number of wiki plugins for WordPress but they
all seemed overly complex and not really geared towards a use case of users collaborating
on creating a site.

Thus, I created my own WordPress plugin called [Family Wiki](https://github.com/akirk/family-wiki/),
available for now at [https://github.com/akirk/family-wiki/](https://github.com/akirk/family-wiki/)

WordPress has the advantage that you can set it up very quickly and got many options
for setting it up. Plus, when you have already multiple blogs (e.g. for family members)
on your domain, it’s easy to just add another blog to your WordPress multisite. 
The plugin works on a standalone blog, too.

Here are some screenshots that I made as a demo:

[[

A homepage showing a missing wiki page.

[[

A person page with a missing wiki page

[[

Gutenberg view of a person page with the shortcodes

[[

A 404 page exposing the “Create Page” link in the header

[[

A person page with external links

[[

A calendar page

[[

Inserting a birthday calendar block

[Personal](https://alex.kirk.at/category/personal/), [WordPress](https://alex.kirk.at/category/wordpress/)

Read this next

[Previous Post](https://alex.kirk.at/2022/05/02/1071525/)

## One response to “Keeping Family History with WordPress”

 1. [alex.kirk.at](https://alex.kirk.at/2024/01/19/keeping-a-family-wiki/)
 2. [January 19, 2024](https://alex.kirk.at/2022/08/31/keeping-family-history-with-wordpress/comment-page-1/#comment-84669)
 3. Members of my (some of them extended) family recently entered and left life, which
    is always an opportunity to think about my family. I’ve written…
 4. [Log in to Reply](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-login.php?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Falex.kirk.at%2F2022%2F08%2F31%2Fkeeping-family-history-with-wordpress%2F)

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