Genosis - Free Jamroom 5 Total Conversion

I’ve just finished updating the Genosis profile to no longer be private - today we release our first “Total Conversion” for Jamroom 5 - Genosis :

https://www.jamroom.net/genosis

Genosis is a departure from the “normal” Jamroom modules and skins you may be used to - it has been designed from the ground up to help you build a Family Tree online .  Since Jamroom is a “profile centered” application framework, building a site featuring Ancestor Profiles is a natural fit, and there’s just not a lot of good software out there if you want to put your family tree online for your friends and relatives.

Genosis sprang to life after a fruitless search on my part to come up with a way to build a family tree online.  There certainly are a number of packages out there, but all of them seemed clunky and “data centered” (in other words they looked like excel spreadsheets put online - this type of layout may appeal to a genealogical researcher, but not family and friends that just want a nice clean site where they can view their family information).  So Genosis was born as a set of modules plus a skin on top of Jamroom 5 (JR5 is really an awesome platform for building stuff like this).

So today we’re finally taking the wraps off of the Genosis beta, and are looking for users that want to help us out with feedback.  Ideally you have some (even limited) experience using Family Tree software (such as Ancestry.com, Family Tree Maker, etc.), but even if you’re just curious to check it out and take a stab at working out your family history, we’d love to get your impressions.

Genosis Consists of 5 custom modules:

• Genosis Core - provides core level support for other Genosis modules
• Genosis Events - powers the main profile “Timeline”
• Genosis Sources - Collect and reference your genealogical resources - includes built in PDF viewer
• Genosis Research - a plugin based “research” module helping you uncover facts and records on your ancestors
• Genosis Stories - save stories about your ancestors

And a custom skin:

• Genosis Family Tree Skin - a specially designed skin setup to highlight ancestor profiles, images and stories, as well as featuring a dedicated Research section accessible to your “researchers” (admin users).

Genosis is setup to take advantage of the the File, Image Galleries and User Comments modules if they are installed in the system as well.

Like I mentioned earlier I know this is not the “normal” Jamroom stuff you would see from us, but I’ve been doing genealogical research for some time and the rest of the team have been very cool about me wanting to share this with the JR community - hopefully a few of you are interested as well.  For those of you that would like to see what it looks like, feel free to check out my “work in progress” family site here:

http://johnsonfamily.talldude.net/

Only Ancestors born before 1900 are viewable, but you will be able to see how things are setup and work.

Developing Genosis has been a lot of fun, and in the process I’ve added a ton of new functionality into the Jamroom Core that is going to help all JR developers - including ourselves, as we’ll be taking the wraps off our next big Jamroom Project here in the not too distant future

We hope you enjoy Genosis!

- Brian