|
An example of a publicly-editable map. Users may sign up for an account and post items of interest by drawing on the map. Admins for each layer must approve new data and new signups.
Proceed to the demo
|
|
The titles and other content in these maps are for demo purposes only and should NOT be taken as factual.
Some content is publicly editable and we are not responsible for spam, profanity, etc.
- A more fully-featured map-based system for sharing information. Controls are necessarily more complex: signup pages, information panels, coordinate locations, layer switchers, and even a "digitizer" for drawing directly on the map..
- A visually impressive full-page map with overlaid panels for user interaction. Why marginalize your map if it's supposed to be the center of attention? The overlaid panels allow the user interface to be minimized for a clear view.
- You may login to the map using the usernames listed in the map. Each user has different levels of access: no administrator privileges, administrator privilege for a specific layer, or the super-admin account which can administer all layers plus user accounts.
- Anybody may sign up for an account; their access will be enabled after they have been approved by the super-admin.
- Once logged in, a person may draw new features on the map. Newly-submitted features are not visible until they have been "approved" by the admin for that layer. This provides the opportunity for quality control, correction, spam control, or other intervention before the data is truly public.
- This uses OpenLayers and our own provided basemaps. All data here is freely available from the US National Atlas and the US Department of Agriculture. While not as slick as Google, it is completely free of copyright and usage restrictions.
- The basemap data is rendered via TileCache, which not only displays the map tiles but also stores them for faster service later. Being static and unlikely to change more than every several years, the basemaps were good candidates for TileCache. The user-edited overlays are not suitable for TileCache, as they can be edited by anybody and the cached tiles would constantly be out of date.
- Written in PHP, and uses Smarty (a templating system for PHP) to separate the HTML content from the program code. This makes changes more modular, faster and easier, and less likely to damage surrounding code.
- This app uses TileCache for the static basemap layers. TileCache generates the "tiles" of the map but also stores them for faster retrieval next time. This makes TileCache unsuitable for dynamic layers, but great for static data layers.
|
|
A picture is worth a thousand words. A working example is worth a thousand pages.
|
|
