Hello from Chicagoland,
My project last summer was to set up a wiki for some of my genealogy stuff. It's worked pretty well, figured out how to use sidebars and export to PDF, etc. Still struggling to show a tree in a friendly manner, but that's a different topic.
In case you're interested:
http://neff.family.name/unwiki/doku.php?id=un:00_start
I'm a software engineer, but C/C++ in the embedded world (small controller doo-dads), no database experience, no PHP until now. I was still able to get in there and tweak a couple things though.