FAQ

Yes, everything is free. There is no paid version, no account and no external service: your tree lives in your own WordPress site. The plugin is open source under the GPL.

A WordPress site (WordPress 6.0 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer) and your tree as a GEDCOM file, which every genealogy program can export. Start with Getting started.

Yes. The pages of people are ordinary WordPress pages, so they take the look of your theme; the Archive card and Chronicle layouts also use its fonts and, if you want, its colours. Pages can be built in the block editor, in Elementor or another page builder: put the shortcode into a Shortcode widget, whole or in parts. See The persona page.

Large trees are uploaded in short steps, so the time limit of your hosting does not stop them. A tree of 5,000 people loads in about 16 seconds on an ordinary hosting; an update of it takes under a minute. Pages for any number of people are created in portions. Very large trees mostly need enough disk space for the photos.

Yes. Each tree gets its own number, the Batch Id: upload the second tree with Batch Id 2. The trees live apart, and the shortcodes take batch="2" or batchId="2" to show one of them. See Batch Id.

Any program that exports GEDCOM: versions 5.5, 5.5.1, 7.0 and 7.1, also GEDZIP (.gdz) and a .zip with the photos. Any encoding works, including Cyrillic Windows files. See Which files are accepted.

Yes, that is the normal way to keep the site up to date: upload the new file with the same Batch Id. People are updated in place; their pages, addresses, your own text on the pages and the photos stay. If your program renumbered people, RootsPersona recognises them by their code, name and birth year or relatives. If the file looks like a different tree, the upload stops before anything is changed. See Updating the tree.

The file on your computer is not touched. The copy uploaded to the site is read into the plugin’s tables and then deleted, together with the archive it came in. The photos of an archive go to the media library.

Yes: Tools → RootsPersona → Export GEDCOM gives GEDCOM 5.5.1, GEDCOM 7.0 or GEDZIP with the photos, with or without living people. See Exporting the tree.

Open Tools → RootsPersona → Upload GEDCOM, press Clear log in the Import log box, upload the file again, then press Download log. Describe the problem on the support forum and offer the log; it may contain names from your tree, so do not post it publicly. See When an upload fails.

A GEDCOM file only names the photo files on your computer. Open Tools → RootsPersona → Upload photos and choose the folder with the photos: only the files the tree refers to are uploaded, each onto the pages of its people. Or upload the tree as a .gdz or .zip archive with the photos. See Getting started, step 5.

The map shows places that have coordinates in the GEDCOM file. It is drawn with Leaflet, included in the plugin; the map images come from OpenStreetMap, so the visitor’s browser contacts the OpenStreetMap servers, which see the visitor’s IP address. Mention it in your privacy policy, or switch the map off. See Map of places.

Yes. Save the chart as an SVG file, upload it on Tools → RootsPersona → Tree chart and put [rootspersona_chart] on a page: every person on the chart becomes a link to their page. See Chart of the whole tree.

Someone without a death date who was born less than 110 years ago counts as living; people without dates are judged by their events and relatives. What visitors see of living people is a setting: everything, only for logged-in members, or nothing. Hidden people are left out of titles, menus, search engines, sitemaps, search, the front page of the tree and, if you choose, the export. See Privacy.

Set living people to Members Only and create an account on your site for each relative (Users → Add New, the role Subscriber is enough). Logged-in relatives see them, visitors do not.

Yes. Every person has a real page with their name in the title and schema.org Person markup, and the pages are included in the sitemap of your site. Hidden people get a noindex tag and are left out of sitemaps.

RootsPersona is translated by the community at translate.wordpress.org. Open your language there and suggest or correct a string. Once the language team approves it, WordPress delivers it to all sites by itself, no plugin update is needed.

From a version earlier than 2.4.0, upgrade to 2.4.0 first, then to the current version. Make a backup of the site before.