Mapping With Drupal - Alan Palazzolo [2]
Acknowledgments
Alan and Thomas would like to thank the book’s technical reviewers, including Denis Wood, Sara Hodges, Robert Holmes, Joseph Bachana, Ronald Turnbull, Théodore Biadala, Reuben Turk, Ankur Rishi, and Patrick Hayes. Thanks also to Julie Steele from O’Reilly for guiding us through the writing process. And a very special thanks to all of the people who have contributed to Drupal and open source mapping over the years.
Alan has been working on the OpenLayers module for Drupal for almost three years and would like to thank all the amazing people that have helped out on the project and made it the successful project it is today. This includes all the committers, patch providers, documenters, and screencasters; thank you all very much. He would also like to thank the Drupal community as a whole for being so supportive and welcoming over the years; it is projects like Drupal that really show how open source is more than just code. He would also like to personally thank Ellie F. for supporting him through writing this book.
Thomas would like to thank his father, Ronald Turnbull, both for tirelessly editing the entire book and for teaching him as a five-year-old to read maps. He would also like to thank his geography teachers over the years, especially Irene McCann, George Dalling, and Bob Hodgart. Thanks go to Wendy Brawer at Green Map for introducing him to Drupal and the concept of open source mapmaking. Thanks finally to Sara Hodges for her input and support.
Chapter 1. Why Map with Drupal
Drupal powers over 1% of the Internet, more than one million websites. Over a quarter of adult Americans use mobile or social location-based services such as Google Maps, Weather lookups, and restaurant searches (see Pew Internet). As location becomes a core part of what users expect from websites and mobile devices, Drupal gives you the tools to create a website that meets these demands. Drupal’s strength is in creating interactions between mapping data and all the other sorts of data (e.g., restaurant reviews, business locations, user locations, voting districts).
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the theory of maps, cartography, and considerations of mapping in general. A well-designed and well-thought-out map can increase the usefulness and usability of a web application. At the same time, a cumbersome, badly devised map can frustrate users and drive them away from your site. These first two chapters will not instruct you in the technical abilities that you need to get maps on your Drupal site. Instead, and more importantly, they will help you think about the maps you are creating, what they are for, and what you expect the user to get out of them. If you just want to start making maps with Drupal, and you know exactly what maps you need, skip ahead to Chapter 3, but it is worth reading these introductory chapters and understanding your role as map maker.
Chapter 1 introduces mapping, specifically web mapping, and why you may want to make maps with Drupal. Chapter 2 dives deeper into the mapping concepts that you will come across, such as map projections and data storage, and outlines some of the challenges of making maps online. Chapters 3 and 4 contain an overview of the main mapping modules for Drupal and have detailed tutorials for configuring these modules to create maps. Chapter 3 focuses on the storage of spatial data and Chapter 4 covers using this data to create maps. Chapters 5 and 6 are about customizing the maps on your site by creating your own modules. Chapter 5 explains how to use JavaScript and PHP to add new ways of interacting with maps. Chapter 6 provides ways to make your maps look more beautiful. Chapter 7 pulls this all together with an explanation of how to configure your maps in code for use with version control.
The Power of Maps
Maps, generally defined, probably first appeared over 18,000 years ago (see Wikipedia), but it wasn’t really until the 1500s that maps (as we think of them today) were produced in large numbers (Woods, Rethinking