Advanced Mapping with OpenLayers and Drupal

Track: 
Coder
Experience: 
Advanced

Web mapping has become a familiar interface to most users, but moving outside of panning, zooming, and popups is still new ground for user interface design. It's important to be able to create user-friendly, powerful interactions with your maps so your site and your data stay meaningful inside the mapping interface.

Drupal's integration with the OpenLayers JavaScript library provides a quick way to use CCK and views to build interactive maps to display data. Several behaviors, styles and layers come with the OpenLayers module to allow people to interact with maps, however these will never meet all the requirements of a real world project.

This will be a fairly advanced code-heavy session showing how to create your own custom behaviors, styles and layers for different use-cases such as:
- auto-detecting a visitor's location and zooming to that point on the map
- breaking out of the popup: different ways of displaying text on a map
- using neighborhoods on a map as a search tool
- customizing your markers based on data
- displaying images on maps

Examples will be drawn from the recently relaunched http://sheltercentre.org and the soon to be relaunched http://zagat.com

Intended audience: 

You should be interested in maps, or at least in different ways that users can interact with data on your site. You should be familiar with OpenLayers, or at least comfortable following the online documentation and video tutorials to do the basic configuration of the module. You should understand javascript and be familiar with Drupal.behaviors.

Questions answered by this session
Question 1: 
What are OpenLayers Behaviors, and how do they interact with Drupal?
Question 2: 
What can Drupal's OpenLayers module do out of the box?
Question 3: 
How can new map behaviors, styles and layers be created?
Question 4: 
How can maps interact with the rest of a Drupal site?
Question 5: 
What have other people done with mapping in Drupal?
4.210525
Your rating: None Average: 4.2 (38 votes)

Diamond Sponsors

 
VPS NET
Palantir.net

Platinum sponsors

 
workhabit
Trellon

Gold Sponsors

 
Chapter Three
Drupal Connect
Duo
HotDrupal.com
Treehouse Agency
Microsoft
NorthPoint