WeRelate:Suggestions/Enhancing the Children List on a Family Page

This suggestion is related to these other suggestions involving the family page:

• WeRelate:Suggestions/"No children" box for family pages

In a recent discussion about representing stillborn and other unnamed children on JBS66's talk page it was pointed out that the options were limited by the fact that the name used was the only way to convey gender on the family page.

That seems unnecessarily limiting both for the case of unnamed children and even for the case of users looking at a page from a culture not their own.

One could imagine replacing the dot following the digit on the family page by a recognizable symbol conveying gender such as unicode astrological Mars (♂) and Venus (♀) Venus symbols. Maybe even color them blue or pink to enhance the effect.

(The Verein fur Computergenealogie OFB uses these characters and colors them.)

Another feature some sites (e.g. RootsWeb) have which might be used on the family pages is a symbol denoting a child whose page links to additional content. This symbol could be triggered by either a spouse or children or solely by children; I would find either way useful.

--Pkeegstra 14:51, 14 July 2012 (EDT)

The technology described in the suggestion "No children" box for family pages would be useful for minimizing the complexity of the query needed for the second half of my suggestion. To get the full effect it would be useful to keep for each person a sum over all families that person is a spouse in. Then a simple test on that field being nonzero could be used to know whether or not to display the "has children" icon.

Is it possible to populate these totals (per family and then per person) automatically on page updates? A database with "triggers" would make this simpler, but any automated implementation would be better than relying on manual maintenance, right?

--Pkeegstra 16:36, 20 July 2012 (EDT)