26 Miles

Some years back, say 2000, I wrote my PHP/MySQL-based family portal (which we still use today). I wanted a site that supported user-authentication and allowed users to self-manage their own login credentials.

At the time, the market had a small handful of photo-sharing services or open-source apps but nothing that could do everything I wanted like I wanted it done, so I was left with either having a wide-open, public site or writing my own software. I chose to roll-my-own.

As of today, features I’ve built into my site include:

• A family address book
• A shared calendar
• Blog pages for each family member
• Blog archives
• Photo-pages for each family member
• Member comments
• Some basic reports showing traffic patterns
• A simple admin interface that allows me to grant/deny access to the portal
• A family blog with a pretty sophisticated photo-navigation system

Someday, I’d still like to build in:

• Photo and video tagging
• An advanced search engine
• User-configurable CSS-based themes
• A centrally-accessible video library
• A CMS to speed updating the site

I’m also tightly wedded to the application architecture and file structure for many of the features so it’s not very portable.

Today, a friend sent me a link to the Easy Family Portal.

It’s a Ruby on Rails application and has some promising features for others seeking similar features, specifically authentication. But it also builds in some other niceties like email lists, gift lists, and some basic WYSIWYG CMS-like features.

Honestly my portal does a whole lot more than this one at this stage, but presuming it’s under active development (which mine isn’t), it may surpass my site in terms of features before long.

For anyone starting out with putting a family website together, it looks like it could be the start to a pretty solid platform.