v25.8.0

Just when you thought August would pass without a Gramps Web frontend release, here it comes, with performance improvements, features, and bug fixes!

Lazy loading of components on editing

Gramps Web's user interface is designed as a single-page app that doesn't require a page reload even when data changes, as the components fetch the updated data in the background. So far, when editing data, such as adding a new person to the database, this lead to a burst of calls to the backend server that could lead to a sluggish experience when making multiple edits in succession.

In this release, significant effort went into making this data reloading "lazier", i.e. only fetching the data when the component requesting it is actually visible again.

What sounds like a technical detail should actually make the editing experience in Gramps Web much snappier!

Alternative place names

Gramps supports associating one or more alternative names to a place and optionally restricting those to a date span. Support for displaying those alternative place names and their dates has been added by @cajturner in this release. Adding and editing alternative place names from the UI is already in the works for a future release, stay tuned!

Reorder person names

@mschuepbach added the possibility to reorder multiple names associated with a person, which allows for instance making an alternative name the primary name (by moving it to the top).

Bug fixes

The following bugs were fixed in this release:

• When adding a new photo, the set date is not saved #559
• Relationships deeper than 15 generations shown as "not related" #636
• Type selection broken when cancelling form #729
• When creating a new person marked as private, birth and death events are not marked as private #553
• Select dropdowns are hidden in dialogs #714

Translation updates

Translations for Hebrew, Catalan, Austrian, Danish, French, and Italian have been updated. Thanks to the Weblate community!

v25.7.3

Wow, 4 releases in a single month including 3 feature releases. I'm pretty sure that's a new record 🚀

New object view layout 📰

The main change in this release is a change of the layout of all objects views, i.e. detail views for people, families, events, places etc.

From the very beginning of Gramps Web, these views had a row of tabs, originally motivated by the similarity to the tabbed layout in Gramps Web. However, this view had several disadvantages.

• It was not very mobile friendly - only the first two or three of the tabs are visible on a typical mobile screen, so the tab bar had to be scrolled
• It required several clicks to reveal all the information, so it also wasn't possible to search for words across the entire view
• When switching to edit mode and back, sometimes the wrong tab was selected

Having to click to reveal the tabs was particularly annoying for objects that only contain little information, e.g. an event with one picture and one participant.

On the other hand, displaying all the information on a single page could make it difficult to navigate for objects that contain lots of information, typically people.

The solution to address all these issues is the new object view in Gramps Web 25.7.3, which removes the tabs and makes the entire content accessible by scrolling, but also adds an easily accessible table of contents to quickly jump between the different sections (which mostly correspond to the old tabs). On wide screens, this table of contents can be found in a small sidebar on the right. On smaller screens, every section heading contains a button which reveals the table of contents in a popup.

One trade-off that had to be made is that the new release temporarily removes the timeline view in the person view, because it didn't fit into the new layout. But it will be back in a different place in a future release.

Happy scrolling! 📜

Before

After

v25.7.2

Better Onboarding

This third release in July brings some improvements that will be invisble to most users... 😞

But they are still useful - because they simplify the experience for users who have just set up an empty Gramps Web instance! 🫶

Until now, the onboarding dialog had the option to upload an existing family tree even before seeing Gramps Web for the first time. But according to feedback from users, it was often not clear to them whether they would also have the opportunity to import a file at a later point if they chose not to do so in this step. To increase clarity, this option has now been simply removed from the onboarding dialog. Instead, the dashboard will now show a welcome message in case of an empty tree and two buttons to go to the "add person" view or to the import button.

Moreover, some elements of the dashboard are now hidden by default if the tree is empty (such as the widget to select a home person, which doesn't make sense without a person in the tree).

Small changes, but hopefully making the start of the journey into Gramps Web smoother for new users! ⛵

v25.7.1

This is a small maintenance release fixing two regressions: one preventing the dropdown to select the user groups allowed to use AI chat from showing up in the user management, the other preventing the display of pins on the map in cetrain situations.

v25.7.0

Vector Maps! 🗺️😍

This release introduces a major improvement of the map view in Gramps Web: the underlying library was changed from Leaflet, which uses raster tiles, to MapLibre, which uses vector tiles. With vector tiles, the map is now super crisp on any screen, zooming and panning is smoother, and you'll even see 3D buildings in cities! And the best thing is, all of the map features you enjoyed so far have been ported to the new version: location pins, time filters, image overlays, and the search function. Of course, also OpenHistoricalMap is still available (and actually is integrated even better now as it was already using the MapLibre via a Leaflet plugin).

In making this improvment possible, two things should be highlighted:

• This is the first time funds from Grampshub have been used to partially fund the development of a new feature. Needless to say, this feature benefits all users of Gramps Web. See also the associated Grampshub blog post.
• The base map vector layer has been set to OpenFreeMap. OpenFreeMap is a public instance hosting vector tiles based on OpenStreetMap. It is completely free to use, and you don't even need an API key. If you like the new map feature, please consider donating to the creator and maintainer of OpenFreemap.

The comment about donations also applies to OpenHistoricalMap, who also provide their vector tiles free of charge.

Bug fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this release:

• Minimizing Browser Window during edit mode drops changes typed before saving #656
• Detailed person overview empty when no given names are entered #589
• Delete all button not working when password has to be entered again #676

Docker image tag format change

The tag format of the docker image has been changed from vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH to pure semantic versioning, MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Consequently, this release will have the docker image tag 25.7.0. The latest tag still works as before.

v25.6.0

Speed, style & new development setup

This June release of Gramps Web brings a host of improvements, but three of them stand out:

• Speed improvements thanks to backend caching
• Continuing style updates and the migration to Material 3
• A new, simplified development setup

Let's dive into them.

Speedup thanks to backend caching 🚀

The new release 3.2.0 of Gramps Web API, the server component of Gramps Web, has introduced caching of requests, which should make Gramps Web feel much snappier in your browser. You can learn more in the Web API 3.2.0 release notes.

Style updates 🎨

As we continue to migrate to the refreshed Material 3 components, the most visible change in this release is the change of the typeface used in headings from Roboto Slab to Inter (the font we also use for everything else in the UI). We hope you like it. If not, we hope you'll get used to it. 😉

You'll notice some modified buttons in the person view and a new button to open the DNA match view for people with DNA data.

@m-breitbach has been busy migrating some dialogs from the old to the new material component framwork, having to touch no less than 19 files. Thanks for that!

Brace for more style updates in the next release!

New development setup 🔧

To simplify getting started with Gramps Web frontend development, we have created a new default development setup. It is based on Visual Studio Code and Dev Containers. This uses containers to set up a standardized, fully featured development environment with all the necessary dependencies. To find out more, check out the new development documentation.

Together with the corresponding backend development setup, it should now be much easier to help improving Gramps Web.

Statistics

Gramps Web's backend will now ping a server every 24 hours to allow the Gramps Web team to estimate the total number of active installations. No information about the tree or other personally identifiable information is sent! Learn more in the Web API 3.2.0 release notes.

v25.5.2

Welcome to the third release in May! As the dust is settling on the transition to Gramps 6.0, it's time again for features and refactoring. 🚀

Changes to settings button & logout ⚙️

The settings button in top right of the interface previously linked directly to the user settings page, which also contained a logout button. This has now been changed into a dropdown menu which allows to directly navigate to one of the subpages (user settings, administration, user management, system info) or to log out directly from the dropdown.

In addition, the settings subpages (accessible as tabs) now have their own URL, such as /settings/administration etc.

Fixed graph report settings 🩹

A long standing bug (#326) with the graph report settings has finally been fixed.

Refactoring under the hood 🛠️

The migration from the old v1 material web components (mwc-) to the new v2 components (md-) gained some traction. In most cases, this will be hardly visible, but you'll notice some subtle changes over the next releases, such as more rounded buttons. First and foremost, this will make the frontend code more future proof.

Backend updates: search index update in the background 🚀

Release 3.1.0 of Gramps Web API made a small but important change to how the search indices are updated when adding or modifying and object. This is now done as a background task rather than as part of the request, which means in practice that adding or updating objects will "feel" much faster, as the browser will not have to wait for the search indices to be updated.

Translation updates 🌐

As usual, lots of translations have been updated. Thanks to the Weblate community!

v25.5.1

This is a quick followup release to v25.5.0 fixing several issues with Gramps 6.0 (Gramps Web API 3.0), in particular incorrect handling of object types (#651).

But there is also a new feature: in the media lightbox view, there is now a new button that allows to hide the person outlines (and only shows them when hovering over the face with the mouse). This can be particularly useful for group pictures with lots of tagged faces. Thanks to @jdelaney72 for the implementation!

v25.5.0

Gramps Web API 3.0 (Gramps 6.0) compatibility

Today, version 3.0 of Gramps Web API, the backend of Gramps Web, has been released. Gramps Web API 3.0 is based on Gramps 6.0.

Release v25.5.0 of the Gramps Web frontend is fully compatible with Gramps Web API 3.0 and Gramps 6.0. Moreover, the Gramps Web Docker images (ghcr.io/gramps-project/grampsweb) are based on Gramps 6.0 starting from this release. Gramps 6.0 brings many improvements under the hood and should also make many operations faster.

Please make sure to check the release notes and the upgrade documentation. Additional steps are necessary to upgrade your tree to the latest database schema.

Please report any issues you might encounter in the upgrade process via the usual channels. Most importantly, don't forget to back up your tree before you upgrade.

Other Improvements

Apart from the major change regarding the backend, a small improvement has also been made in the frontend: the home person can now be changed directly from the dashboard (previously, it linked to the settings page).

v25.4.1

This maintenenace release fixes an issue with the GPS geolocation button in the map view and updates several translations.

Gramps 6.0 update roadmap

Note that the Docker release image of the next release will likely be based on Gramps Web API v3.0, which uses Gramps v6.0 under the hood. If you are using the ghcr.io/gramps-project/grampsweb Docker image with the latest tag and do not want to upgrade yet, you might want to pin the version to v25.4.1 (this release). The Docker development images (latest-devel) will be switched to a beta of Gramps Web API v3.0 soon.