David - one of the biggest problems with hosting any genealogical data on line is the availability of it. For instance - if you take your data - should you and your family be available for general viewing and manipulation or not? You are a 'living' person, therefore (as you have already no doubt found out), many sites will not even allow oyu to display your own information unless your data is marked 'dead'.
Then there are issues peculiar to individual countries - England has it's Data Protection Act which, as I understand it, is forcing many genealogical based sites to 'hide' their data behind registratikon systems (Genes Reunited, Ancestry, Sotland's People, Find My Past etc.) and some won;t even allow informaiton for living people to be displayed under any circumstances.
(No offence intended btw) - with 700 people in it, your data is still very small so at the stage you are at, you won;t have much to worry about. My data is currently around 25,800 individuals (roughly 21,000 on my wife's side the remainder on mine but growing very quickly recently) and it is data like this that starts to preent other 'visibility' problems. For instance - Whilst some sites can calculate if a person might still be alive (most tend to use 120 years as a cut off point) - again, if I use you as an example - if you have a birth date but no death date you would assumed to still be alive. But if we take your 4th Gt Grandfather where you might have his birth year (let's say 1790) but no death year, many of the aforementioned sites will treat him differently. Some will assume he is dead (I guess we would have to hope otherwise he would need a lot of caring
) but some (and I think GR is one of these from memory) he is assumed to be alive and therefore his informaiton (name, dates - everything) hidden from view from everyone.
You mention phpGedView - it was one of the packages I looked at about 4 years ago finally deciding not to go with it for a number of reasons. One of the main ones - its slow development. I ended up with TNT - The Next Generation of Genealogical Software. It is under constant development and enhancement. I looked at these after playing around with writing my own and finally deciding, as you said, not to 'reinvent the wheel'
But whichever way - the one thing I have learnt is that no matter what *you* do it will never please everyone (I use the 'Royal You' here). What you may like, say, for displaying various spouses - even to the point of how you put labels on the screen for multiple married people - is in all likelihood going to not please others.
TNG is currently undergoing a very 'vigourous' discussion about how to display BMD certificates - to the point of copyright on them. The one thing that has come out of this is that there are as many views on it as there are users...
You have private email from me - use the domain name in my email to look at my site. You will note that if you go to it initially there are very few menu items on the main page - if you register one of the menu options that comes up is Genealogy - IOW, you can't even see it until you register. Even then - and this is another issue for genealogical sites - I do not allow ANY web bot access to my site - especially my genealogical data. This is another area where you will never get a clear concensus on whether you should or shouldn't allow bots to search your site(s).
Believe me though - if you do go ahead with it - expect headaches and heartache. Personally, go for a package that is already developed and running. There is one particular user for TNG who offers specialised hosting for other TNG users - to the point where all they have to do is sign up and he sets up their TNG site for them. That is something that has become very useful to users who aren't completely literate.
And then you will have to cope with those users who don't and won't trust their data solely to an internet site and use a desktop package to maintain their data and use the web site solely to display it (that is how mine works - Legacy being my mai tool). And even here - as you will begin to find out - even though .ged is *supposed* to be a standard format, there are difference between the way desktop packages not only format the data, but how they include it - a good example is Family Tree Maker strips leading zeroes of UID's of people when creating a GEDCOM - doesn't sound much BUT if your system records, say, John Smith with a UID of 000010 and his spouse, Linda, as 000011 - FTM will give you 10 and 11, Legacy will give you 000010 and 000011 BUT FTM can also, under some circumstance after adding data to the file, five you (wild example here) 93 and 183 - IOW - FTM has this ability to renumber individuals within its data files - doesn't affect its own data, but plays merry hell if the user isn't aware of this issue - and, from messages on TNG, this is still happening in the latest releases of FTM...
Hope the above helps - drop me an email if you want to discuss further (My data, btw, has been on line now since about 1997/98 so yes, have played around with quite a few of the available software packages) - stephen at ser dot id dot au
Punctuation is the difference between 'Let's eat, grandma' and 'Let's eat grandma'
(address is an image to stop bots. reading my email, so you can't copy and paste it from here, sorry)
-- Their wiki is so out of date; I started to update some pages but I don't have time to work on their site as I have my own to build.