drupal-planet

Alan Palazzolo (zzolo) and Thomas Turnbull (tom_o_t) are proud to announce the release of Mapping with Drupal, published by O’Reilly.

Build beautiful interactive maps on your Drupal website, and tell engaging visual stories with your data. This concise guide shows you how to create custom geographical maps from top to bottom, using Drupal 7 tools and out-of-the-box modules. You’ll learn how mapping works in Drupal, with examples on how to use intuitive interfaces to map local events, businesses, groups, and other custom data.

In the current D7 development branch of the Drupal OpenLayers module there are some really great interface and styling updates that will make maps a lot more exciting and more intuitive to use.

Before

After

The images above are screenshots (click to expand) of the default maps that currently come with the stable version of the OpenLayers module and library (before) and then new styling for default maps in the development branch (after). Let's go through the changes:

1. New image set based on MapBox's image set and filled in by ndagire. This is huge! The default image set that comes with the OpenLayers module is pretty ugly; see for yourself.
2. New default feature styles. This was a no brainer once we got new images. It is much better than that orange color.
3. Provided markers come with the modules, a combination of ndagire's images and a couple markers I made, the module now comes with some markers out of the box. Besides this being visually exciting, I think it will help people grok the module more easily.
4. New popup provided by Harris Rashid which goes very well with the new image set.
5. New map styling to compliment the image set. A little CSS can go a long way.
6. New Mapquest tiles by default. mikl helped get this tile set into the module core. And though it was tough to let go of the OpenStreetMap default tileset, the MapQuest tiles are actually based off the OpenStreetMap data, don't require a third-party library, are free, and look so much better!
7. Wrap dateline (not numbered) is when the tiles repeat themselves as they go past the International Date Line which means as you pan east or west, it keeps going. This is a bit nerdy, but it means that the map fills up the area completely and looks much better.

So, all in all, an amazing improvement to what was a mediocre visual experience out of the box. I am really taken back by the contributions of the community to make this happen. And considering that I have talked twice about Making Beautiful Maps in Drupal both here and here, it was about time this became more of a reality.

Map Previews

I have also been adding some interface improvements to the OpenLayers UI module that comes with the main core module. If you look at the After image above, you'll notice it says "Preview". The map building interface now has a preview button so that you can see the map before you even save it (data and all). This is really great, as before you had to save the map, then go to the display page (done with the Views module), just to see if it worked. I can't believe I hadn't done this earlier.

Style Previews

When listing styles in the OpenLayers UI, you will now see a marker preview for the styles with icons, and a little map thumbnail for vector based styling. The icon preview was done by Pol at the OpenLayers Sprint at DrupalCon London. The map thumbnails are actually little OpenLayers maps that show a random place with the style on top.

When editing styles, there is also a larger map to preview the style. This is a larger map, but same principle as the list. This also contains crosshairs so that you can see how the style is centered on the feature it is representing.

Layer Previews

Coming soon. This is not implemented yet, and a bit harder to accomplish as often layers require maps to be certain ways. But I think we can still have this doable for the majority of layers.

Testing

All this work and more is currently in the development branch. There are some known bugs. Any help testing out would be greatly appreciated. Please put any bugs into the issue queue. I am hoping to have some time over Thanksgiving to follow through with this sprint and get out another release (probably the final alpha).

This year at the Bay Area Drupal Camp on Friday, October 21, 2011 we will be holding the first ever Drupal Non-Profit Summit, an event focused on bringing all the great people working with Drupal in the non-profit sector. And there are lots of us; we have around 150 signups already!

We went and saw the venue where the summit will be held today, the Marsh in downtown Berkeley, and it's going to be perfect for what we want to do. We are trying to push the boundaries of what has been done at Drupal events traditionally. Indeed, it is technically the first of its kind, but, more importantly, we are really focusing on conversation and group activities. We will barely be using projectors, sitting in circles, and gently nudging everyone to participate (you know all that hippie stuff you expect from Berkeley). We hope people learn a lot, but more importantly, we hope that we can build relationships between all the great people using Drupal to make the world a better place.

The hope is that this will become a regular event for this important sector within the Drupal community (hopefully not so close to PNWDSummit next time). If you are town, please stop on by, it'll be all smiles.

Geospatial BoF's DrupalCon scheduled!

Today (Tuesday), March 08, 2011, at 3:15PM in the Missouri Room is the "Building the Drupal Geospatial Stack", where developers will talk about the many geospatial modules in Drupal and how they can and do work together and what collaboration points there may or may not be.
http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/building-drupal-geo-stack

Then tomorrow, Wednesday March 09, 2011 at 10AM in the Missouri Room, we will have a user focused support BoF, "Drupal Geospatial Support" to have users of the geospatial modules to have discussions on what is working or not and what questions they have about using these sets of modules in Drupal.
http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/drupal-geospatial-support

And finally, the Development Seed team will be discussing their impressive new tool, TileMill, tomorrow Wednesday March 09, 2011, at 11AM also in the Missouri Room to demo and discuss how this tool integrates with Drupal.
http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/tilemill-tilestream-and-drupal

Hope to see everyone there.

I can't believe it's been just about 6 months since Drupal Copenhagen. But it's that time again to come to together in Chicago to talk on geospatial topics in Drupal. There are a number of things going on in this area. Birds of Feathers (BoF) discussions time and place should be determined on Monday.

Thomas Turnbull and I are giving a presentation about how to make your maps beautiful in Drupal on March 9th Wednesday at 1PM. This will be focusing on what are the many different levels of customizations you can do to get a look for your maps that best fits in with the design of your site. The audience of this presentation spans across site builders, themers, and developers. We will talk about many different modules like OpenLayers and GMap and tools like Cloudmade and TileMill.

There will be a BoF focused on GIS-related developers in Drupal. This will focus on how we can, as a community, create a more consistent architecture and interoperability of geospatial functions like data storage, geocoding, and mapping.

On the flip side, we'll have a BoF discussion for geospatial modules users to converse about issues that happen, what are positives of modules, and general experiences.

I hope to see you in one of these places! Let me know if there are other things in this area that are happening that I have not listed.

In just some very short days, DrupalCon Chicago 2011 will start and it will be huge! I have to say I am a bit nervous by 1000's of Drupalers in one hotel; but I am totally excited as well and can't wait to see what gets done in a week.

I just wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the activities going on around Drupal and Government at DrupalCon this year.

There's been very big news recently concerning Drupal and government with the launch of Open Public, a Drupal distribution aimed at government agencies. Jeff Walpole from Phase2 will be leading a session on their new Open Public product. This will be worth seeing.

And, as a new fellow in the Code for America program, I wanted to get the government folks together just to some bonding and seeing where people are, so I have proposed a Drupal and Government BoF.

I hope to meet a lot of people working in the government sector or who are interested in it. Also, if you really want to get into Drupal and Government, check out Drupal Gov Days in Belgium in April this year.

See the forum sprint topic about Code Review for updates and questions

Friday, March 11, is the day of Sprints at DrupalCon Chicago 2011. I know writing code is important, but its also really important to make sure we have more people on board to write that code. This involves doing code reviews. So, let's do this on Friday!

We need people to do code reviews. All you have to do is feel like you have a solid grasp of writing modules and you can do this! We want to attack the project application queue.

Want to have your application reviewed in person? Come and join us and make this process more meaningful and speedy. Make sure you have started your application.

And finally, theres lots of other things that can be done. Documentation always needs some extra love. It would be great to get some visual materials to help get more people to both contribute code and review code. Also, it would be super cool to think critically about how Drupal does outreach to get new code contributors, and how we can specially get a more diverse crowd contributing.

Everyone is welcome!

I was lucky enough to live near Amanda (mndonx) for a few years in Minneapolis, where we worked on many projects together and often went to the coffee shop together when working from home got a bit maddening. Her current, main job is theming at Advomatic.

Amanda definitely answered a lot of my Drupal theming questions along the way, but there is so much more as to why she deserves a quick thank you. As much as the technical challenges of Drupal are fun and the community is great, it is still very important to me to keep focus on why I do the work I do and this is why Amanda is so great. Amanda's been a huge inspiration by being so involved and driven to use her talents for social change in local communities. I have always tried to use my powers for good, but I am very humbled when comparing myself to Amanda. She helped start Free Geek Twin Cities and Boneshaker Books as well as being involved in countless local organisations and communities including the once was Arise! Books (all Drupal sites by the way). I am not sure how she is able to balance all the awesome things she works on.

So, a big thank you goes out to Amanda for being an awesome friend and a huge inspiration both personally and professionally.

About These Posts

Drupal Highlights is a series of short posts saying a small token of appreciation to members in the Drupal community who might not otherwise get as much recognition as the more prominent contributors in the community do (though they totally deserve it as well). I think it is very important and strengthening for a community to showcase all the amazing things that happen in a community no matter how small. Please let me know if you want me to highlight someone you know.

This is the first in, hopefully, a many part series of short posts where I want to help highlight people in the Drupal community who I think are awesome, but might not get much spotlight. See below for more explanation.

The first person I want to highlight and say thank you to is Tom MacWright (tmcw). I have worked with him on the OpenLayers module for over a year now and he has been crucial in making the project what it is today and teaching me lots of things along the way. He also is very active in the overall web mapping space in Drupal and outside with such technologies as Mapnik and Mapbox.

Tom has recently lead the upgrade of the OpenLayers module to Drupal 7 (still alpha) and is very active in the issue queue. He has definitely picked up a lot my slack. Tom was also the driving factor behind getting the OpenLayers module on a Ctools architecture, which, though took me a while to see, has shown me the power of Ctools and the plugin goodness. This has lead me to starting a new project to build a common set of Ctools plugins for a general mapping architecture in Drupal.

Tom is also one of the leads at Dev Seed behind awesome work like live complex mapping in Drupal (TileLive), Maps on a Stick, TileMill, and so much more. Though a lot of this work is still not all that accessible to the average web developer, Tom and his colleagues have and are making huge strides towards a future where custom, open source web mapping is easy for us all. This is just awe inspiring and deserves a great big thank you; keep up the awesome work.

About These Posts

Drupal Highlights is a series of short posts saying a small token of appreciation to members in the Drupal community who might not otherwise get as much recognition as the more prominent contributors in the community do (though they totally deserve it as well). I think it is very important and strengthening for a community to showcase all the amazing things that happen in a community no matter how small. Please let me know if you want me to highlight someone you know.