Just a quick note to say that I finally got around to releasing a new version of Retrospect-GDS, my open source genealogy software. This new version comes with two new language translations, bringing the total to 10. More details in the official announcement.

The new template now has a name: SummerBreeze. Here’s what else is new:

• The Family page now uses some tables to avoid unsightly display problems when the content overruns the div area. These were previously divs set to “display: hidden;â€?, but what’s the use of having more data than you can show? All data is now shown, and the table cells all wrap properly.
• If an event has comments/descriptions, they are shown on a separate line from the place data
• Removed print and email buttons from both the new and old templates. The email has never been functional and the print button is really just a waste of real estate.
• You can now override the default modules by placing your own in the themes/mytheme/modules folder. If any modules exist in this directory, they will be used instead of the default module.

In addition to creating the new summerbreeze template I re-skinned the administration template. It now shares some of the styling of the summerbreeze template.

You can more information about Retrospect-GDS on the official Retrospect-GDS project page.

The new template still follows the basic pattern of the old template, but is has been updated with better use of fonts and colors. The CSS and markup has also been greatly simplified. The only complicated bit is the new tabbed navigation. I used the CSS Sliding Doors technique from A List Apart and some of the elements from the CSS Sliding Doors 2 article. I chose to leave out the rollovers and I haven’t corrected for the anchor width problem in IE. In any other browser besides IE, the entire tab is clickable. In Internet Exploder you’re stuck with just the text being clickable. The fix for IE requires far too much structural markup for my taste, so I’m leaving it out. After getting all the tabs working, I found that the template started randomly inducing the the IE Peekaboo bug. Thankfully I found that the Peekaboo bug is now easily fixed with the Holly Hack.

What else is new or changed so far?

• The left sidebar menu has been replaced with a horizontal menu bar under the header banner. The links have been styled as buttons and I’ve taken great care to ensure that the language drop-down is vertically centered in every browser that I can get my hands on. Guess which one was the most difficult to get centered? This frees up a lot of real estate for the rest of the content.
• A gender icon is now shown after each person’s name in surname lists and search results windows.
• The surname list is displayed in 5 columns instead of 4.
• Fixed slash escaped characters showing up in the comments.
• The pedigree chart has been completely overhauled. The lines and boxes are made up of simple graphic elements positioned with CSS. I think it looks much better than the square lines and boxes of the old template.
• The tabbed navigation has been replaced with graphical elements. No more ugly square tabs.

That’s all I can think of for now. Stay tuned for part 2 as the work progresses.

You can more information about Retrospect-GDS on the official Retrospect-GDS project page.