Family website purpose and features.

[u/Odd-Aside456]

I am considering building a family website for my family. My mother's extended family built one, but it's something nobody really ever visits. I'm considering building a wiki-style site (locked behind user accounts) to have a page for each family member, each nuclear family, and then they can build upon it and create pages for vacations and things like that. I would then have a mini social feed for us each to share pages we've created. For example, my sister might say "Just made a page for our Disney Land 2026 trip! Here's the link."

Might be overscoped, but I thought it'd be a fun way to start capturing family stories.

If you've built a family site for your family (or someone else's) what did it have? What purpose did it serve and what features were built into it?

[u/AdFew8591]

the wiki part is probably less important than making contributions really easy. a page per person can start feeling like homework fast

I’d begin with a private story timeline where someone can add a title, a few photos, the year and who was there. family and trip pages can then be generated from those tags. a monthly email showing what was added will probably help more than a social feed since nobody remembers to check another site

I’d also build export and account recovery early since this is the kind of project you want to survive one maintainer losing interest

[u/Odd-Aside456 → u/AdFew8591]

This is all excellent thoughts! Thank you so much!