How to save family info

Many years ago, in the 1999, I started with my brother in law, an ambitious project :

The Project APKH

The goal was (is) to document, store and preserve information about our families.




Everybody has old pictures around.
More and more time pass, many of these pictures lose information.
Who was on that picture with uncle George ?
Who is that group of people on the picture on the beach ?
And what beach is it ?
But also stories, family recipes, tales, relationship with close friends.

However identifying who is on a picture is just one small part.
How to store the picture and data and make all this easily accessible for consultation ?
The problem to better organize information, store them for long time and have them easily accessible is a quite complicated business !

History

The beginning of course was to scan the pictures and create a text file associated to the picture, containing a list of people in it and a description of the picture, who made it, why, where, etc.
A naming system was created in order to have a unique name for each picture or video or document.
Then a list of "sources" was created.
Each people creating documents (scanned pictures, video, etc.) is a source.
So the created documents were stored in directories, one for each source.
Since at the time the main backup storage was the CD, all the material was stored in "CD unit", i.e. each directory was not bigger than a CD in order to be able to write that on a CD.

But there was still the problem about how to allow other people to explore the documented material and also how to simplify the creation of that.
The procedure required some technological skill and in any case the storage/organization was manual.
So a web site was created with the purpose to help to create the documents and to see what was done.
We are talking about 1999 early 2000.
The website was in HTML and CSS with some javascripts.
To maintain the website required still a lot of work and not everybody could easily create documents.

Then I learned about Joomla.
The first site based on Joomla 1.0 was born with plugins to help to archive pictures.
Everyone could easily write content and save pictures in it.
Then other plugins were added, among them one to handle a GED file.
In fact, in parallel with the Joomla development, I did start also to build a family tree with a program (Ancestral Quest).
This program created a GED file and with some plugin for Joomla it was possible to have it integrated in the site as well.
The plugins were not perfect and there were problems, anyway for few years the site did work.

Then new versions of Joomla come out with different requirements and one day it was not possible to continue to use it (changed requirements, PHP version, newer distributions prevented the old site to work, etc.)
The site was hosted on a my server and also that needed upgrades and changes.
The bottom line is that all the material stored in Joomla is still available on the database but not easily and directly usable.

Now what ...

Now I have a lot of documents, pictures and descriptions, policies, procedures.
I have a database full of old Joomla articles, I have a GED file now stored in an online genealogy research website and I'm working to better keep organized the material and create useful tools to work on the Project.

Some goals and requirements :

• Have a website where to search for the material archived
• Have a way to link to the GED file, even better if integrated with site
• Have a way to simplify the creation of documents and allow people with less technical knowledge to participate to the process
• Have a backup of the material on different ways

and also (very important) 

• don't use cloud services, I want to have the data on a  my server for privacy and safe storage reasons
• be able to bring the material in different formats, for example in a printed book
• create a place where to share memories, information, thus chatting/calling
• create a place to help to communicate between members of the families

I'm rebuilding the web site using one of the latest version of Joomla (currently the 3.9), importing the material from the old original Joomla website and integrating it with the genealogical website.