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Version 2.2 of Web Family Tree (WFT) is now available. You can download it from
www.pmoylan.org/pages/os2/wft.html
or www.pmoylan.org/ftp/software/wft_2.2.zip
or by anonymous FTP or SFTP on the same site. It is freeware, and source code is available for download at the same place.

WFT.exe is a CGI application for displaying a family tree on the web. (So to use it you must have, or obtain, an OS/2 web server.) It takes its data from a GEDCOM file, or a set of GEDCOM files. GEDCOM is the de facto standard for transferring data between a variety of genealogy software. (So WFT will also accept GEDCOMs that have been edited on Windows or Linux.) To see what the WFT output looks like, take a look at
www.pmoylan.org/cgi-bin/wft.cmd
All of the underlined names are clickable links, and so are the four buttons at the top of the display. WFT doesn't precompile the GEDCOM files. Instead, it uses internal caches and index files to make a new page display quickly.

The zip file includes utitilies fixgen, fixup, ged2html, GEDMerge, gedsort, lint, subset, and tidy for various operations on GEDCOM files. (They are standalone utilities; none of them is used by the CGI application wft.exe.) In particular, ged2html is a second-best solution for those who don't control their own web server.

The only languages supported so far are Danish, German, English, French, and Dutch, but it's easy to add another language. This is useful if you want to display the family tree to elderly relatives who can only remember their first language. They will be impressed and delighted when they recognise their own grandparents in the display, and they might even give you extra family data that you didn't know about.

-- Peter Moylan www.pmoylan.org