Hi guys!
I’m porting a genealogy database from FileMaker Pro to a LAMP web-app. I want to open it to my family to read and edit but I’m worried that anyone could mess up the data by mistake or on purpose. How can I go about securing it beyond just having backups of the database? Any suggestions.
Seeing how popular social websites have become, I’m thinking that this genealogy web-app could be a great way for my extended family to stay in touch. I have family on five continents! 
How difficult is it to create a “Time machine” or a permanent “hypertext” file like Ted Nelson had in mind?
You’re definitely going to need login functionality. ALso, ACL might be appropriate for this application.
It might be a good idea to create branches within your tree that can only be edited by a member of that branch. Or alternatively, just have all edits be submitted for administrative review.
Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner but sometime life gets in the way of ones plans. In this case it was a whole section of one of my websites disappearing from Google SERPs caused by a hard to detect bug in my code. :injured:
Login is going to be standard practice for editing. What is “ACL?”
It might be a good idea to create branches within your tree that can only be edited by a member of that branch. Or alternatively, just have all edits be submitted for administrative review.
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t want to have active administrators. In all the human edited directories I’ve seen they really slow everything down and, as in all centralized systems, they know less that the collective unwashed masses. I like the branch idea and that would work nicely if I could tie the person’s password to his tree record (node). Then it would be a question of calculating how far from himself, up and down the tree, the person can edit.
Thanks for your feedback!