I want to use Drupal for building a Genealogy application. The difficulty, I see, is in allowing users to upload a gedcom file and for it to be parsed and then from that data, various Drupal nodes would be created. Nodes in Drupal are content items. So, I'd have individuals and families as content types and each would have various events as fields that would come from the gedcom file.
The gedcom file is a generic format for genealogy information. Different desktop applications take the data and convert it to a proprietary format. What I am not sure about how to accomplish is to give the end user a form to upload their gedcom file and then have it create nodes, aka content items, with Drupal. I can find open source code to parse a gedcom file, using python, or perl, or other languages. So, I could use one of these libraries to create from the gedcom file output in JSON, XML, CSV, etc.
Drupal is written in PHP and another detail of the challenge is that for the end user, I don't want to ask him/her to find that file created in step one (where step one is the parse and convert of the gedcom file) and upload that into Drupal. I'd like to somehow make this happen in one step as far as the end user sees. Somehow I would need a way to trigger Drupal to import the data after it is converted into JSON, or XML or CSV.
I am not personally familiar with Drupal. But I do know there already is a fairly advanced program written for Drupal called Family Tree that is a project at Drupal.org.
You might want to check that project out, or even better, contribute to it and improve it.
Disclaimer: I have no connection at all to the project, and I've never even tried the module. I just happen to be aware of it.