Requirements
To use FamilyStory, you’ll need administration access to a WordPress installation.
A new, clean installation is recommended. FamilyStory should work with other plugins, but as it can’t be tested with every plug-in out there, it can’t be guaranteed! A clean installation allows you to play around with the features of FamilyStory without worrying about breaking an existing website.
There are some minimum software requirements — we prefer to build new features than support old software, so your WordPress installation will need to be running up-to-date versions of:
- WordPress – minimum 6.4.0
- PHP – minimum 8.1
We don’t recommend any specific WordPress host — just search for “WordPress hosting” on your favourite search engine — or here are a couple you could try.
Install the FamilyStory plugin
FamilyStory is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, so installation is easy:
- Log in to WordPress (using an account with Administrator rights)
- Click on the “Plugins“ admin menu
- Click “Add New“ and search for “FamilyStory”
- Click “Install Now”, and once installed click “Activate”
- Once Activated, you will notice a range of new menu items appear. Ignore them for now, we’ll get to check them out soon!
Install a theme
You don’t need any specific theme to build a FamilyStory website – it should work with any. However, we can’t test all the available themes, so there may be some that don’t display all FamilyStory content correctly.
There are a couple of themes that are specifically designed to show your research at its best, and we’d recommend installing one of these, at least to start with:
[Installation Instructions]
FamilyStory has been tested with most of the default WordPress themes, and these can be recommended as alternatives:
[List of tested themes]
If there’s a specific theme you’d like to use, and it isn’t working with FamilyStory, get in touch and we’ll see what we can do about it.
Review settings
You might want to take a quick look at the Family Story Settings page, and make sure things are configured the way you like it. Just click on “Settings > FamilyStory” to review the settings. There are links to support articles about each setting on that page.
While you’re there, we’d ask you to consider enabling the “Show Built with FamilyStory” setting. This isn’t enabled by default, but as free software, our marketing budget is very limited, so we’d appreciate the additional exposure this could give! On FamilyStory themes, this will add a small “Built with FamilyStory” credit in the footer. On other themes, the credit will be shown at the bottom of pages generated by FamilyStory.
Start uploading content!
Now for the fun part – building your FamilyStory website! If you’re happy just to click around and try things, please go ahead – there is plenty of help and hints displayed as you go. If you’d like a bit more guidance, we recommend reading “Where do I start?”