Tips for a successful v13 upgrade

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Darrin Lythgoe

With TNG 13 being released today (Sep. 21, 2020), I thought I’d take a minute to go over some of the things to watch out for while you’re upgrading your site. All of these apply no matter which version you’re installing.

Install the upgrade, not the full version. When you get to the v13 downloads page, the first link near the top will be for brand new TNG users. What you want is a little further down in the Updates section. Also take note that a new version of the full version readme.html file will be included with your upgrade, but the installation instructions for the upgrade will be in a different file. The name of that file will be listed next to the download link. For example, if you’re coming from version 12, the file will be called readme12x-13x.html or readme123-13x.html. If you accidentally open readme.html, it should warn you that you’re about to install the full version. If you see that, go back! Installing the full version on top of an existing install will cause you to lose your data and your customizations.
Make sure you choose the right upgrade. Before you begin, go to your TNG Admin menu and look at the top of the screen. It should say there what your current version is. Anything that starts with “12” (like 12.0.1 or 12.1.1) counts as “12.x”. You will see links for several different upgrades on the v13 downloads page. Be sure to get the one most appropriate for your currently installed version. If you have v11 but you install the upgrade for users with 12.x, you will likely notice errors when you’re done.
Don’t forget the backup. At the top of the instructions, you’re advised to back up your key files (mainly the configuration files, like config.php, pedconfig.php, etc., but also any others that you may have customized). If you do make a mistake at some point, having a backup can save you a lot of headaches. Once the upgrade is finished and everything is running smoothly, back up your tables again.
Remember to view the upgrade readme from your browser, not your home computer. One of the first steps is to upload the files to your site. After that, you need to load the instructions again from your site. In other words, if your site is www.mysite.com and you’re upgrading from 12.0.1, open your web browser and go to http://www.mysite.com/readme12x-13x.html from there. If you continue with the local copy you opened immediately after downloading, some of the later steps won’t work.
Don’t skip any steps. A lot of people think they just have to upload the files, but there’s a little more to it than that. The step most people still skip is the one relating to database structure changes (if you see a bunch of database query errors after installing the upgrade, this is probably what you did). There’s usually just a simple link you have to click. Doing that will open another page that runs through a list of database updates. Depending on the version you had previously, some of the items may say “Failed or done previously”. Don’t be alarmed if you see some of those.
Update your template. For most people, this should be simple. If you’ve never tinkered with the HTML or PHP in your template files, just upload the entire “templates” folder from the upgrade and that’s it. If you have made any customizations (not the Template Settings or the mytngstyle.css style sheets) and you want to keep those , then you’ll probably want to merge your changes in with the latest files. Some of the new features may not work unless you’re using the latest template files.
Clear your browser cache. Once you’re done, go into your browser settings or preferences and clear the cache (or “temporary Internet files”). Until you do that, your browser might decide to hang on to some of the old pages, and that could present a conflict. Some features might not work. The instructions for clearing the cache vary from one browser to another, so do a Google search on this if you’re not sure how to do it.

If you still have issues and you think you may have botched the instructions, feel free to ask for help from me or the user list (tngusers2). If you think you might have found a program bug, please contact me directly (darrin@lythgoes.net).

Despite the possible pitfalls described here, the upgrade process should be fairly easy. If you’re still sure you won’t be able to do the upgrade yourself, there are other options though. Simply Hosting no longer does upgrades, but I can do it for an extra $15, and others could be hired as well. I might be swamped at first if too many people request this, so please be patient.

Translating TNG into other languages

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Darrin Lythgoe

Parts of TNG have already been translated into 21 languages (besides English), but there are quite a few languages that are not supported as of yet. If you have thought about translating TNG into a new language, here’s what you’ll need to do.

First, use an FTP program or the file manager on your site control panel to navigate into the “languages” folder and create a new folder for your new language. You should see folders for all the other languages there, like this:

Afrikaans
Afrikaans-UTF8
Arabic-UTF8
Croatian
Croatian-UTF8

The “-UTF8” at the end of some folders means that the files in that folder are UTF-8 encoded. If your data or your new language uses letters or characters outside of the standard 26-character alphabet used in English, you should name your new folder in similar fashion (e.g., “Hebrew-UTF8”).

Next, copy the files from the folder of your native language (use the “-UTF8” version if your new language will also be using UTF-8) and paste them into your new folder. The files should be named admintext.php, alltext.php and text.php.

Now go in TNG to Admin/Languages and create a new language record for your new language. Select your new language folder in the “Language folder” dropdown box. Put “UTF-8” in the character set field if your new language will be UTF-8 encoded. Otherwise use “ISO-8859-1” as the character set. Click the “Help for this area” link for hints on any of the fields or options. Don’t forget to save. Also, if this is the first language record you’ve created under Admin/Languages, you must also create a record for your primary language. If you forget to do that, you won’t be able switch back when you try out your new language later!

Finally (and this is the biggest step), edit the files you pasted into your new folder and translate the messages. You can do this by editing the files right on your site, or you can download them to your computer and edit them there. Be sure to use a pure text editor (not MS Word or anything that will add formatting). Notepad++ (Windows) and TextEdit (Mac) are good options. If you are creating a UTF-8 file, you might need to select UTF-8 as the encoding type (no byte order mark, or BOM).

When you’re doing the translations, be sure to translate only the messages and not the “keys”. For example, the messages you see will look something like this:

$text[‘family’] = “Family”;
$text[‘birth’] = “Birth”;

In these examples, the keys are what you see inside the square brackets. The messages are what you see between the double quotes. In the end, your new translations will look something like this:

$text[‘family’] = “сям’я”;
$text[‘birth’] = “нараджэння”;

One other thing to remember is that double quotes within the message need to be “escaped” with a backslash. An escaped message looks something like this:

$text[‘message’] = “This is an \”escaped\” message”;

If you forget to escape the nested quotes, your site may show only blank pages until you fix it.

When you’re done, save the files and copy them back to your website if necessary. To see your work in action, choose the new language from the language dropdown box on any page of your site. If you weren’t sure of the context while doing the translation, you might want to check to see if any guesses you made were correct, then go back and correct them if necessary.

And one more thing: If you feel inclined to share, I would love to include your new translations in future versions of TNG so others can benefit. Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions!

A Few TNG Tutorials

Posted on October 14, 2016 by Darrin Lythgoe

If you’ve seen the TNG Facebook page , you may have also seen Jim Benedict posting a lot of helpful “how to” articles on various TNG-related topics. You can see them all on his site at http://tng.one-name.net/, but I’d like to spotlight some of them here as well. Today I’m going to highlight all of the ones relating to “Trees” (as defined in TNG) and the importing and exporting of GEDCOM files:

How to import a GEDCOM
Getting all your family data into TNG, including an explanation of the Import screen options.

Exporting a GEDCOM to TNG
A few words on the process of preparing your data for import, along with some useful tools.

Adding and deleting Trees
A “Tree” in TNG is a container for your GEDCOM data. Here Jim talks about creating and editing these containers.

Trees and GEDCOM downloads
How to allow or prevent users from downloading GEDCOM files from the trees on your site.

How importing a GEDCOM is different from uploading
Examining the different parts of the import process.

Forgot your TNG login? Here’s what you can do:

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Darrin Lythgoe

If you’ve forgotten your TNG admin login, here are a few things you can try to regain access to your site:

1. Go to the TNG login page (either on the public side or the admin side) and use the form there to ask TNG to email you your username or (if you know that already) a new password (your password is encrypted in the database, so it can’t send you that). The message should arrive within a minute or two. If you don’t see it, that could mean that you never entered an email address, or your address has changed since you set up your account, or maybe that your host is not allowing TNG to send email. In any case, if the mail doesn’t arrive, you’ll need to try something else.

2. Log in to your site control panel (not part of TNG) and find a tool there called phpMyAdmin (ask your provider to point you to it if you don’t see it right away). Launch that tool, then find your database on the left side and click on it to select it. Once the tables appear, click on the tng_users table to display all of your user accounts. At this point you have three choices:

2a. Delete all of the records in the tng_users table. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to enter the TNG admin menu without a login (so do it quick and recreate your accounts).

2b. Alternately, you could edit your account record, take note of the username, then change the password_type field to “none” (no quotes). Next, edit the password field and change it to something you’ll remember, then log into TNG with that password. Now your password will *not* be encrypted in the database. If that doesn’t bother you, you can leave it as it is. If it does, then go in TNG to Admin/Users and create a new admin account for yourself and delete the old one.

2c. A third option is to insert a brand new record in the tng_users table. Create a record with full admin rights (all “allow” fields set to “1” and the “gedcom” field left blank), also with the password_type field set to “none” (the word “none”, no quotes), then log in with that account. Once you’re in, reset the password on your old account and then delete this one.

3. If you can’t find phpMyAdmin or can’t figure out how to use it, you can ask me to do it for you. If you do that, know that I will need access to your site control panel, so you can save us a step by sending me that login to begin with.

Tips for a Successful Upgrade

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Darrin Lythgoe

With TNG 10 being released today (Feb. 12, 2014), I thought I’d take a minute to go over some of the things to watch out for while you’re upgrading your site. All of these apply no matter which version you’re installing.

Install the upgrade, not the full version. When you get to the v10 downloads page, the first link near the top will be for brand new TNG users. What you want is a little further down in the Updates section. Also take note that a new version of the full version readme.html file will be included with your upgrade, but the installation instructions for the upgrade will be in a different file. The name of that file will be listed next to the download link. For example, if you’re coming from version 9, the file will be called readme9x-1000.html or readme922-1000.html. If you accidentally open readme.html, it should warn you that you’re about to install the full version. If you see that, go back! Installing the full version on top of an existing install will cause you to lose your data and your customizations.
Make sure you choose the right upgrade. Before you begin, go to your TNG Admin menu and look at the top of the screen. It should say there what your current version is. Anything that starts with “9” (like 9.0.1 or 9.1.1) counts as “9.x”. You will see links for several different upgrades on the v10 downloads page. Be sure to get the one most appropriate for your currently installed version. If you have v8 but you install the upgrade for users with 9.x, you will likely notice errors when you’re done.
Don’t forget the backup. At the top of the instructions, you’re advised to back up your key files (mainly the configuration files, like config.php, pedconfig.php, etc., but also any others that you may have customized). If you do make a mistake at some point, having a backup can save you a lot of headaches. Once the upgrade is finished and everything is running smoothly, back up your tables again.
Remember to view the upgrade readme from your browser, not your home computer. One of the first steps is to upload the files to your site. After that, you need to load the instructions again from your site. In other words, if your site is www.mysite.com and you’re upgrading from 9.0.1, open your web browser and go to http://www.mysite.com/readme9x-1000.html from there. If you continue with the local copy you opened immediately after downloading, some of the later steps won’t work.
Don’t skip any steps. A lot of people think they just have to upload the files, but there’s a little more to it than that. The step most people still skip is the one relating to database structure changes (if you see a bunch of database query errors after installing the upgrade, this is probably what you did). There’s usually just a simple link you have to click. Doing that will open another page that runs through a list of database updates. Depending on the version you had previously, some of the items may say “Failed or done previously”. Don’t be alarmed if you see some of those.
Update your template. OK, this step can be a little confusing. Prior to TNG 8.1, templates were installed by uploading the template files directly into the main TNG folder, overwriting the existing files with the same names. Since 8.1, however, the template files have all been moved to a folder called “templates”. If you’ve been around since before 8.1 and want to keep your old template, there are a few extra hoops to jump through, and those are explained in the instructions.

Also, if any of you have tinkered with your template files (not the Template Settings or the mytngstyle.css style sheets) and you want to keep those customizations, then you’ll probably want to merge your changes in with the latest files. Some of the new features won’t work unless you’re using the latest template files.

For most people, however, this should be simple. Just upload the entire “templates” folder from the upgrade and that’s it.
Clear your browser cache. Once you’re done, go into your browser settings or preferences and clear the cache (or “temporary Internet files”). Until you do that, your browser might decide to hang on to some of the old pages, and that could present a conflict. Some features might not work. The instructions for clearing the cache vary from one browser to another, so do a Google search on this if you’re not sure how to do it.

WordPress Hints

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Darrin Lythgoe

Thinking of integrating TNG into your WordPress installation? The advantage of that is that users who need to log into both environments only have to do it once. Anyway, if you need some hints on how to do it, you might try one of these resources:

Kloosterman-website How I made my TNG-WP site
Cees Kloosterman discusses how he went about the integration. According to Cees, the great advantage of his method is that you are not restricted to the one sidebar theme layout. Any theme design (1, 2, no sidebars, menu anywhere) will work.

Using TNG and WordPress with the tng-wordpress-plugin
A very thorough approach by Roger Moffat, detailed on the TNG Wiki. In fact, scroll down a bit to see a full write-up on Roger’s site right here on this blog.

Anyone know of any others? Please post them in the comments here.

Tutorial: Basic Customization of Template 8

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Andrea Lythgoe

TNG comes with eleven templates included with the software. Template 8 is a popular one that is a good example of how easy it is to make the template your own. Here’s one example of how a TNG user has customized the template:

This diagram shows the many things that can be customized in this template:

We will go through each of these and how you can adjust them:

First, you log in as the administrator, and click into the Administration area. Choose “Settings” on the left side of the Admin Area, and then you’ll see the option of “Template Settings”, you’ll click on that. Then you will see a place where you can choose the template you want to work with from the drop down menu. We’re working with template 8 today. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see this screen, which I’ve numbered to match the example above so that you can see which item adjusts which area of the template. Scroll down for details on how to adjust each area:

#1 Header Image – this needs to be one image. In the template, several different photos were combined into one file for the header. If you have a photo editing program, you can combine several images in a similar way, or you could just use one image. A wide image that is not very tall works best. For this template, the header image needs to be 778 X 73 pixels.

#2 Welcome Paragraph – This is a place where you can use whatever text you would like to welcome users to your site. It’s a good place to introduce yourself, briefly summarize your research, or invite users to register on the site. The photo that accompanies the welcome paragraph will be a random image selected from the public images on your site and will change every time you load the page. You can use HTML in this area to add links, additional images, or other features. The “Create Copy In” is where you can create other versions of your welcome page in other languages. You can have as many versions as you have languages enabled. If you don’t speak other languages, you can just skip this and your welcome paragraph will always display in the language you use for the first version.

#3 Latest News This is an area where you can update it with any information you would like. It is something you would go in and write, kind of like a miniature blog. We recommend removing old entries so it doesn’t get too long and unwieldy.

#4-6 Name of your site – this is a title where the default is three words strung together with the middle word in a different color. You can change the wording to read anything you would like. If you only want two words, leave one box empty.

#7 Subtitle of your site – this goes underneath the name of your site, and you can make it say anything you want. We recommend a short and memorable tag line.

Scroll down farther and you’ll see the rest of the template options:

#8 (and 11) Mom’s Side Label – This is the text that will display in the left sidebar. It could say “Mom’s Side” or you can change it to say a specific surname, the first name of the wife in the couple running the site, whatever works for you and your situation. Again, there is a “Create Copy In” area where you can make copies of this custom text for any different languages you want to use.

#9 (and 12) Mom’s Side Person ID – this is the ID of the person you want this particular link to go to when the link is clicked. Clicking this link will take the person to a pedigree chart beginning with this person.

#10 (and 13) Mom’s side tree ID – Enter the tree ID here. (You can find the tree ID by looking in the Admin area under “Trees”.) Some people have their whole site in one tree, some have set up multiple trees. Make sure you use the right tree.

# 11-13 are the same as the last three, but with the other side of the family.

#14-15 Side Names – These are subtitles for the different sides. You can use them however you want, but the most common use is to list the two most common surnames in that side. You can just leave these blank if you don’t want subtitles.

Last but certainly not least, do not forget to press the SAVE button before leaving the page!

Featured User: Roger Moffat and WordPress Integration

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Andrea Lythgoe

Today’s featured user is Roger Moffat, who maintains a clean and user-friendly WordPress site with TNG integration using the free TNG WordPress Plug-in. Roger is a long-time TNG user who is always a friendly smiling face when he stops by our booth at the conferences where we are exhibiting our product. You can view Roger’s Site at www.lisaandroger.com. His home page is a traditional blog, where he occasionally shares about his life, his own genealogy, and important things to know in the genealogy world.
If you click on the tab at the top that says “genealogy” you will find his TNG work:

Roger has made a few tweaks to the software as it is running on his site. For example, he has the social media sharing buttons visible by default, while the software as-is has the buttons accessible through the small “Share” button for those who want to use them. The TNG WordPress Plug-in uses a dark blue color by default, and Roger has edited the CSS style sheet to get a lighter blue color to match the theme he is using for the rest of his site.

Roger also offers several “mods” he has written to add functionality to TNG, available for free download, with the option of donating to Roger for his time in creating them. You can find these under the “downloads” tab.

Being the helpful kind of guy he is, Roger has written an excellent tutorial on the TNG Wiki on how to use the WordPress Plug-In. It can be a tricky process, so make sure that you read through the entire tutorial first, and then carefully complete the steps in the correct order.

Thank you, Roger, for being such a helpful and friendly member of the TNG community!

The “Share” feature

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Darrin Lythgoe

Did you know you could share your TNG pages in Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or Google+, right from your site? The feature is turned off by default, so I’m sure that more than a few of you are unaware of it. To turn it on, go to Admin/Setup/General Settings/Site Design & Definition, then set “Show Share Link” to Yes. Now you should see a “Share” link near the top of every page in the public area. Click that link and a row of popular social media buttons will fly out, allowing you to share the current page on one or more of them. The “Share” link also changes to “Hide”, so click it again to conceal the buttons.

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