In TNG, these details of biographical or historical interest can be added to the an individual person’s page through addition of custom event types.

Occupation: Cattle Rustler

From the Edit view of the person’s page, the administrator can create Events under “Other Events”. In the “Detail” field, text can be directly quoted from a source .  The source can be attached to the Event.

This method displays the content of the Detail field to the right of the Event, while the Source is placed as a footnote near the bottom of the page.

One caveat to the default TNG page design is that addition of an Other Event Place to the Google Map includes duplication of the Details field for that Event in the map legend.

Occupation: untidy

Since the map legend is a narrow column to the right of the Google Map, these duplicated Details become condensed into short lines of distracting and difficult to read wrapped text.

To remove the duplicated Event Details from the Google Map area, one line of code can be disabled in the getperson. php file.

Find the line:

if($description) $persontext .= " - $description";

and replace it with:

// next line removed to disable mapped Event Details display
// if($description) $persontext .= " - $description";

To further cleanup the Map Legend,  the Place name can be pushed down to the next line with a page break by modifying the next line of code:

$persontext .= " - $dateforeventtable - $place</span></td>\n";

to

$persontext .= " - $dateforeventtable<br/>$place</span></td>\n";

The result is an easier-to-read Google map legend…

Cleaner TNG Google Map Legend

I’m working on a project with a Sharon over at Generations Gone By who has a special affinity for the “Places” category of her family history.

The addition of GoogleMap functionality to TNG fueled the fire of this inspiration. There was a need for more place pins…

In TNG>Admin>Setup>Map Settings>Help:Map Settings

Place Levels Pins: Labels and Colors

Each geocode location can be associated with one of six Place Levels (e.g., Location, Town/City, County/Shire, etc.). The labels for these levels can be found in the “alltext.php” file in each language folder, and you may override them in your “cust_text.php” file (also in each language folder).

The pin colors are determined by values set in mapconfig.php. If you would like to change the pin colors, go to the TNG downloads page and download the full palette of 216 different pin colors, then open your mapconfig.php file in a text editor and enter the number of the new pin color next to the corresponding place level variable. Finally, upload the new pin image file(s) to the googlemaps folder on your site.

For more detailed instructions on how to generate your own custom Google Map pins, visit Google Chart API.

As such, I feel it is my responsibility to oversee user registration. All registered users must prove relationship with a name in my database in order to gain access to view “living” information.

I have a few tricks to handle registered users which you may find helpful.

When a new user registers for access, copy the email address of the user and store it below in the “Notes” field. Enter an administrative email address into the email field. Set the “Rights” and “Access Limits”. Check the box “Notify this user upon account activation”. Click “Save”.

Once activation notification is sent to the administrative email account, edit the user account  to remove the administrative email address by replacing it with the user’s email stored in the “Notes” field. Click “Save”.

The activation notification email includes the user account login info.  Copy the account info from the activation notification into a new email and send it to the user.

The original activation notification is kept on record in a folder of the email program.

If a user forgets the login info, a request to have it sent to the account email address can be made.  However, registered users may forget over time, which email address was used to establish an account.

By retaining a copy of the user registration outside of TNG, the site administrator can use it for the following:

1. Log in as the registered user to view and/or verify access controls are set properly.

2. Supply the user with account registration info if they cannot gain access.