2006-08-23T03:47:29Z | Comments: 2
In my 200th post I wrote about the Pleiades project and our intent to be geospatial leaders for the Plone community and the digital humanities. Release early, release often is a part of the philosophy that Pleiades is porting from the open source software movement. Two months into the project, we're releasing a couple of simple and useful products for Plone: a geocoder, PleiadesGeocoder, and a map, PleiadesOpenLayers.
The PleiadesGeocoder provides a portal_geocoder tool. This uses the Yahoo geocoding API to give you worldwide city-level geocoding precision
and address-level precision for the U.S.
Chances are you have locations in your site already. It's a standard Plone metadata field, and appears in your user personal preferences form. PleiadesGeocoder includes methods for geocoding site user locations and serializing information about users into KML [siteMembers.kml] for use with Google Earth, or GeoRSS [siteMembers.xml] for use with other services. As a bonus, no one can call you a bozo for using this software: we're using XML templates and TAL. If this approach isn't fast enough for you, let us know and we'll redo it in Python with etree.
We want to embed a map application in the Pleiades site. Rather than use a proprietary javascript API from Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, we've opted for the open source alternative: OpenLayers. The PleiadesOpenLayers product applies a handy patch to OpenLayers and wraps it in a Plone skin. The main advantages over a GYM map are the freedom to design our own base map (from a WMS) and the ability to use our Plone site CSS to style map elements. For example, see the ploneful popup box and user icons overlaid on the map below:
You can also check out our live demo.
Versions 0.5 of each product are now available for download. See the project wiki pages for an overview and information about support for these early releases.
Categories: Plone Pleiades Open Source
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Geocoder sounds cool also. I'm going to have to get our member map on OpenPlans going when I get some hacking time.