After about half a year of hard work, we are proud to announce this new version of Genmod. Many enhancements are added, making Genmod a versatile and mature product to manage your genealogical data.

End of life for PHP and MySQL versions lower than 5
This 1.7 version of Genmod will be the last version that supports PHP and MySQL versions lower than 5. In the next versions of Genmod, more use will be made of the possibilities that both PHP5 and MySQL5 have to offer.

Upgrade from 1.6
To upgrade from 1.6, some steps must be taken to adjust to the new database structure. Because some database keys also change, some tables must be emptied first before the changes can be applied. This adds a few steps to the upgrade process.

You can upgrade by following the steps below:

1. Make a backup of all your data and settings. You may use the Backup option from the administration page.
2. Download your Gedcom from the gedcom configuration page. This will preserve all online changes made to the data previously.
3. Drop the individual_families table and the lang_settings table. The latter is most important: you will not be able to upgrade succesfully if it still exists.
4. Replace all files in the Genmod directory with the ones from the new 1.7 Final package, except for your config.php file. If you overwrite it with an empty one from the new package, you must either re-enter all values during install, or retrieve the old config.php from your backup first.
5. Make sure your config.php file is writable.
6. Rerun install from http://mysite.xx/install/install.php . It will preserve all your previously made settings, but you will have to choose the installed languages again. Also, the install will try to write the config.php again, so make sure that (for the moment) it's writable.Make sure you run install from a main URL, known to Genmod, NOT from an alias (if you have any).
7. After finishing the install, you can delete the lang_settings files from your index directory. All settings are stored in the database.
8. You may get some errors now, mentioning undefined index: type. Go to the admin menu, chooese maintenance and then Generate Report Titles.
9. Reimport your gedcom file, as some of the tables must be filled with additional values.

You can download this version from SourceForge.

So, what's new in Genmod 1.7?

Functions

• Support for shared/general notes. One same note can be attached to individuals, families, sources, media and repositories, and to their facts and events. All editing functions are extended for this feature, as well as the record merge facility.
• An option is added for editing, to paste the last selected or entered link to another record type. This is extremely useful when a source link must be added to multiple facts and/or record types.
• On the edit pages, a link is added to display the next free ID's. This is handy if the user wants to give uploaded files the same name as their ID will be.
• Reordering children in a family, by birthdate, also considers christening/baptism dates
• An option is added on the edit pages to directly accept this particular change.
• The Sanity check also checks for child order in families and invalid note links.
• General search can also search in notes, media and repositories. This means that the search now actually covers all available data.
• Support is added for BURI Y and CREM Y.
• After editing persons facts, Genmod will return to the individuals tab it was on before edit.
• Genmod will check on existence of linked ID's entered during edit.
• The RSS-block, or rather what the RSS-feed will show, can be configured now.
• A block is added to show the Top-10 pageviews by bots.
• The delimiting characters to show a persons nickname -Jonathan (John) Doe- can be set in the configuration.
• The recent changes block also shows changes for sources and repositories.
• The statistics page is back in Genmod with new options (thanks Thomas Lerman)
• To support a consistent use of place names, Dutch counties, municipals and places are added.

Reports

• Although not all work has been done, many of the reports are improved and even some added. With thanks to Thomas Lerman for his contributions (on this and other features).
• The ThisPerson, ThisFamily, etc. menu options only show relevant reports

User interface

• All detail pages have the same layout, consisting of one tab for their facts and events, and other tabs for their links to other record types.
• Search results for general search are also shown in different tabs for each record type.

Under the hood

• The IsDead status, often depending on dates of other individuals, will also be recalculated if the data of one of those individuals is changed.
• The performance of the sourcelist page, with link privacy enabled, has dramatically improved.
• The same applies to the family list.
• The performance of the soundex search has dramatically improved also.
• All language settings and many of the configuration settings have moved from file to the database.

Technical

• Genmod now supports the HTTP status 304 IF MODIFIED SINCE, which reduces bot traffic.
• Genmod can be run from other ports than 80.
• Added the query execution time to the page performance statistics.
• Improved support for various database installations on various platforms
• About 100 bugs are fixed, and some undoubtedly introduced.