First Drupal Book of 2012: Mapping with Drupal

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tom_o_t's picture

Only local images are allowed.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.

Although building maps with Drupal can be tricky, this book helps you navigate the system’s complexities for creating sophisticated maps that match your site design. Get the knowledge and tools you need to build useful maps with Drupal today.

  • Get up to speed on map projections, the ethics of making maps, and the challenges of building them online
  • Learn how spatial data is stored, input by users, manipulated, and queried
  • Use the OpenLayers or GMap modules to display maps with lists, tables, and data feeds
  • Create rich, custom interactions by applying geolocation
  • Customize your map’s look and feel with personalized markers, map tiles, and map popups
  • Build modules that add imaginative and engaging interactions

Audience

Mapping with Drupal is aimed at beginner to intermediate Drupal users, though it assumes a basic knowledge of Drupal.

Acknowledgements

Thomas and Alan would like to thank the technical reviewers: Denis Wood, Sara Hodges, Robert Holmes, Joseph Bachana, Ronald Turnbull, Theodore Biadala, Reuben Turk, Ankur Rishi, and Patrick Hayes.

Get the Book!

Available in print ($19.99) and DRM-free ebook ($9.99) from O’Reilly.com
Also available in print and digital from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Drupal Association members get 40% off the print book and 50% off the ebook when purchased from O’Reilly - see the membership benefits page for details.

Comments

Hooray!

mefisto75's picture

Hooray!

Congratulations!

levelos's picture

Amazing to have this resource available to the community. Hopefully it will increase the usage of maps to tell great stories with Drupal. Hats off! Looking forward to checking it out as well.

Lev Tsypin


ThinkShout, Inc.
thinkshout.com | twitter.com/levelos

Great Book - thanks

michaelsilverman's picture

Purchased the book and have only read the first three chapter but have already gotten a number of great ideas that I will be applying to my website.

Thanks!

Congrats

Webmapper's picture

Just purchased the e-book last Saturday and the print copy is on its way in the mail! Great resource that brings the two open source efforts of Drupal and OpenLayers together rather nicely. Many thanks!

The postman is taking too long to come

vcardoso's picture

I've ordered it more than a week ago on Amazon.co.uk but it will take a few days more to arrive as it is sitll not available in Europe.
Can't wait to put my hands on it. This kind of resourses gives Drupal the extra leap to recognition as a really strong development platform.
Contratulations Alan & Thomas.

Wonderful

GeertWil's picture

This was a real joy to read. A whole lot of useful information on a manageable number of pages. But my hunger is still not satisfied. Where can I find more on this subject?

Thanks!

tom_o_t's picture

Thanks! Alan and I just recorded a podcast today - http://drupaleasy.com/podcast/2012/01/drupaleasy-podcast-73-lots-options
But if you really want to dive deeper I think the best strategy is just to get into the code - find a project to play with, find some data to visualize, look at http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/, and make some maps! If you need some further inspiration, take a look at a beautiful site that Alan worked on recently: http://barakasamsara.com/

i just put together an index

dasjo's picture

i just put together an index for the very informative drupaleasy podcast with tom & alan on their mapping book.

05:35; Drupal as one of the first CMS to integrate with Maps
13:30; TileMill
19:00; Client-side performance issues & clustering
24:35; Geocode & center map on users location by using HTML5 Geolocation
29:53; OpenLayers complexities, CTools, Display using Views, Panels or API
34:05; OpenLayers related modules: Geofield, Geocoder, ...
35:20; Geofield in Drupal 7 instead of Location module before
37:40; Recommended setup - Quickstart for storing locations and displaying them
OpenLayers + Geofield + Addressfield
GMap + Location
42:10; Leaflet (Cloudmade)
44:55; Book wrapup
46:25; Book introduction chapters + Motivation on mapping
49:25; Popular mapping blogs, cartography, best map of the year
1:06; Location CCK migrate sandbox
transforms D6 location_cck fields into D7 geofields
1:07; Geocoder, get geospatial data from address field into geofield
1:09:20; Baraka samsara films - map site use case
http://barakasamsara.com/

Thanks

zzolo's picture

Hey @dasjo, thanks for doing that!

--
zzolo

Highly Recommend

kricklin's picture

"Mapping with Drupal" is an excellent introduction to a potentially overwhelming topic. I'm just getting my feet wet with my first mapping project for a nonprofit and now have much more confidence moving forward with it.

Thanks Thomas and Alan - well done.

BTW - the $9.99 purchase price for the electronic version of this book is a steal!

Thanks

tom_o_t's picture

Thank you! Glad to hear that the book was useful.

Mapping, Drupal, Love it!

mboas's picture

Hello fellow Mappers and Developers,

First and foremost, I'm fairly new to Drupal but very versed in GIS applications, data-sets, and custom digital mapping with various other software. I, however am focusing on the Open-source aspect of things and love the idea of the community behind it!

I currently am creating a custom site that basically follows the Mapping with Drupal book as it sets the base of your mapping needs up to allow further direction to be at your discretion. However, I can not seem to get the gmap_geolocate to work as described in the creating a custom module section in the book. I did read the note that mentioned there was some issues creating this portion...

I decided to go the Drupal 6.25 route with Gmap and Location.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Marc

Geolocation

tom_o_t's picture

Hi Marc,

Send me a message through my contact form with details about the problems you were having and I'll see if I can help, and update the book if necessary.

Cheers,
Thomas

Popup Colors

dlshannon's picture

Thomas,
My husband bought me your book as a birthday present and I am convinced that I wouldn't have been able to figure out how to do my OpenLayer maps without it. I just have one final obstacle before they go live.
As your book predicted on page 107, the dark gray popups have replaced the nice white popups. So, now the blue linked text is illegible.
You would expect that just about everyone would need to change the colors of the popups so there should be a lot online about it. But, all I've found are similar questions asked, only to receive replies like "you have to theme it". Yeah, but how? I've tried using CSS in my sub-theme, I've tried changing the color of cloud-popup-relative.png, I've inquired on 3 IRC channels, and lost track of the number of postings I've made on Drupal.org about this. On page 107 you direct people to a page on js-theming but that page is waaay over my head.
Can you please help by providing a nice, step-by-step solution, that is comprehendible by non-programmers, to simply change the color scheme of that popup window back to black on white?
Thank you.

popup colors

tom_o_t's picture

My answer is much the same as ndagire's - the dark background is created by the image mentioned in the book (cloud-popup-relative.png)

If you follow the instructions in the book on page 103 about copying the /theme/default directory into your Drupal installation (e.g. to sites/all/libraries/mappingdrupal_ol_theme) and then copying all the images from /img into sites/all/libraries/mappingdrupal_ol_theme/img

The images in that last folder are the "sprites" that create the color and shape of the popup in OpenLayers. You can edit those images or create new ones of the same size.

Remember to update the settings for OpenLayers on your Drupal site to point to this new location for the OpenLayers library that you placed in sites/all/libraries/mappingdrupal_ol_theme (/admin/structure/openlayers/settings)

Popup colors

ndagire's picture

Hello

This is in response to dlshannon issue.
I would like to understand your situation. I haven't read the book, and I use open layers occasionally.
You said you tried changing the colour of the "cloud-popup-relative.png." Design wise, that did sound smart, or the easy way out. What became of that, did you try it out, yo new coloured pop-up? did it not show?
Because, I have done that and it works.

Please explain,

Location and Mapping

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