Posted by moshe weitzman on May 4, 2006 at 12:18am
On our new groupsbeta staging site, I installed and configured 4 promising modules. The only one that is in good enough condition for use here is signup.module. Please have a look and see if you see what I see. I'd be pleased as punch if some developers contributed patches for the modules below so they work well enough to run here.
- Signup. Please try to signup for an event and note and problems that you have. Better yet, write a patch.
- Location + Gmaps.
The problem is that these modules do not yet play together well. When editing your profile, the Location fieldset is separate from the map and entering in a location from the map blows away your address info (maybe it should). When creating an event, the form looks good and integrated but it seems that the Location info is used and the map info is discarded. Also, the map is sometimes small and doesn't fill up the Location fieldset width.- Show a map in a group with the locations of group subscribers as markers (liie frappr)
- Show a map where all geographic groups are markers
- Show a map of upcoming events across all groups
- FlickrStickr. This module adds a fieldset to the node form just dandy. But it doesn't seem to retrieve images when I click Refresh. Also, it seems to send Safari into some kind of loop where it chews up tons of memory and CPU and has to be killed. Nice.
Comments
Does the stuff Zacker has
Does the stuff Zacker has been showing with views + gmaps + location help? (I say this without having looked at much of anything, but the demos he's put out seem pretty nicely integrated).
Some GMap input
The not playing well applys only to the user location setting stuff. You have to turn that ability off in one of the two modules.
As I mentioned in http://drupal.org/node/58793, the map locations associated with events is not changed at all, nor is it discarded it is just not currently shown on the node page. There is a few different ways of addressing this. Some options will probably be added to a new module gmap_locations.module that will be packaged with gmap.module soon as different ways of doing this.
The comment about the map sometimes being small. I assume that this refers to the fact that if the location was collapsed when the page was initially drawn, then when you uncollapse it only a little piece of the map is drawn. This is a limitation of google maps. It only sizes it based on the size of the div when the map is initially drawn and the javascript has to tell googlemaps when to resize it. If the location settings is collapsed, then google map draws a very small map. When you drag the map at all the module's javascript tells google the map has been resized and it should then fill the div size set in the location map setting. I don't know of any other hooks I could get into to tell google that the map has been resized. Without major invasive coding into the collapse.js script, I don't think it would be easy to get a hook from uncollapsing. I figured that dragging the map would be a likely thing that someone would do when looking at an improperly sized map. It should be noted that if you set is so that the location settings is not initially collapsed you will not have this problem.
I have created a new module gmap_location.module that will be packaged with gmap that will draw a map with all of the nodes on it that have location (lat/long) information. This was created for http://enoughfear.com (not yet using it, but probably will be soon). You can get an idea of how it works by looking at: http://photo-tips.ca/map/nodes Different node types can have different custom markers. Therefore assuming that groups and events are different node types then they can all be displayed on one map and have different marker icons.
The next step with that module will be to be able to display markers based on RSS feeds. This will allow a more arbitrary grouping of nodes of a similar type. You will be able to have multiple feeds on one map with each feed using a different marker icon. Most of the code to do this already exists, so it will be pretty easy to do, I'm just having trouble deciding the data model to store the settings for the different possible pages. The easiest would be to just have one page (say map/feeds) and have the feeds set in the settings page. A much more flexible ability would be to have the map feeds as a node type that could have arbitrary number of feeds available and then you could have an arbitrary number of feeds on an arbitrary number of maps. (It should be noted that initially only local RSS feeds will be used, but in the long run it is forseen that offsite feeds in a number of formats will be able to be addressed)
thanks james
i disabled the gmap for user locations. thanks for the tip. i guess i was invisioning integration just like when you author a node.
i look forward to gmap_locations.module
i uncollapsed that Location fielset per your advice. better now. thanks.
i registered and logged in but still don't have access to http://photo-tips.ca/map/nodes :(
For your long term project and local nodes in particular, I think that easy themeing of a View with a map is a great direction to take. It will require writing a small theme function with a View but thats no problem. See Zach's screencast for details.
So, I carefully entered my location via the map when I created the event node at . Please see that node and suggest changes to make the display more sensible. For instance, i think we should not show the County if all that was entered by default is the default countyr 'United States'. And
My mistake
Whoops that photo-tips thing was a bug with the permission settings and I didn't notice as on the photo-tips site I had always been logged in as an administrator, and on my main testing site the settings were different so I never ran into that problem worked. Should be publically visible now.
I am adding a thing to the gmap_locations.module to show a map for one node. If the node has location information, it will center the map on the location and put a marker there. It will have the ability to deal with some node types in a custom way. I was thinking that the og node type would be one that would be worth doing. I'm thinking that how it would work is that it would show all of the users that have location information that belong to the og as markers and all of the events assocated with a group that have location information as another type of marker.
This should be pretty easy to do. I just need an easy way of getting the list of users associated with an og and the list of event nodes associated with an og.
I will probably try and get the user part working and then send you a copy so that you can try it out and look it over.
Thanks,
James
nice
that sounds perfect, james. we don't even have to mix in nodes and users. i'm more interested in users for the group. and i would show that as a separate page - no room on group home page. the list of group users is og_list_users_sql().