Drupal Mapping Office Hours: Async Version

Posted by Brandonian on August 16, 2013 at 2:11pm

As a very geographically diverse community, we've had trouble getting everyone who is interested in talking about mapping in the Drupal community together at the same time for our Office Hours. We've definitely had some interesting discussions in our Office Hours, but I think there's room for improvement.

So, in the spirit of experimentation and trying something new, I'd like to try to host our next Office Hours asynchronously.

How does this work? In the comments of this post, answer the following questions. It shouldn't take more than 15 minutes or so for your initial post. If you see anything that anyone else has posted that you want to comment and discuss further, let them know!

Questions

What is the last country that you've been to that isn't your home country? How was it? If you've never travelled abroad, which country would you like to visit?
Share something interesting that you've been working on over the past month or so.
What's one thing that you wish was better/would get fixed related to mapping and Drupal? This can be anything from a bug in a module to general community organization. If it's a specific code issue, please link to an issue in the issue queue.
What's your personal goal for geospatial Drupal over the next month?

Comments

My wife and I travelled to

Posted by Brandonian on August 16, 2013 at 2:20pm

My wife and I travelled to Beijing, China a couple of years ago for a conference. We had a lot of fun; it wasn't nearly as crowded as I thought it would be. The worst part was the language barrier. We hadn't learned enough Manderin before going, and most of our conversations turned into games of charades. :-/
I gave a couple of presentations over the general state of mapping and Drupal at NYCCamp and CaptialCamp last month. Here's the video from CaptialCamp.
I would like to see better cohesion/integration between geospatial modules in Drupal 8. I think this is going to require more communication between module maintainers, which I haven't been great at initiating, but want to get better at doing so.
I want to get Geofield 7.x-2.0 released in the next month. Wish me luck!

Also, a quick shout out to Rik de Boer, who has been very helpful in pushing forward 8.x versions of geoPHP, Geofield, and Leaflet modules. Thanks for cracking the whip, Rik!

My Travel:I went from Uganda

Posted by batje on August 16, 2013 at 3:09pm

My Travel:

I went from Uganda to the USA (via my previous home country, The Netherlands). It was nice. Very friendly people, and excited to be able to attend DrupalCon.

What kept me busy:

We are working on Open Aid Map, a sandbox distro, that is going to import/visualize/export IATI data http://iatistandard.org/
Personally I worked on dasjo's geocluster module. I found that very hard, to be honest.

What needs to be fixed:

OpenLayers needs a stable release, views_geojson hopefully gets a lot of patches committted and I need to write a search_api filter for Geocluster that correctly clusters a given geohash and I want to finally build a facet that renders on a map (if each facet's entities has a geofield)

My Goal:

Finish the Open Aid Map distro to such a state that I can demo it at DrupalCon and the Open Data conference http://okcon.org/

What made the geocluster

Posted by Brandonian on August 16, 2013 at 7:58pm

What made the geocluster module hard to work with? I don't have any direct experience using it, curious to see what you think.

Anything solr & search api

Posted by batje on August 19, 2013 at 12:38pm

Anything solr & search api seems to be non-straightforward. (and dasjo used something new called stats for his clustering. Very nice stuff. It gives an aweful lot of additional data about your data, especially if you have numeric data. Some work integrating the solr stats functionality into search api has been done recently and I am looking into how to use that data for maps and graphs.)

The second thing that was hard is that so many parts of the whole solution are moving. Dasjo released his code + patches to other modules in December, and by now, some patches have been applied, some have been changed, some are still lingering. So I had to redo all of them, basically.

Slowly getting there, though.

hey batje, sorry about the

Posted by dasjo on August 19, 2013 at 1:15pm

hey batje, sorry about the inconveniences but i'm glad you are making progress :)

keep us updated, i'd love to read about how you are using geocluster. we should also get some eyes on the patches.

i personally don't think i can do much until drupalcon. but i'd be glad to assist where possible

My plans on Mapping

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 17, 2013 at 1:37am

I love knowing other cultures and traveling to othe countries. I took part of College in the USA, but now I'm back in Brazil. My last international trip was to DrupalCon Munich. I'm always open to go to other places, as working with Drupal gives me this freedom to work anywhere I can find internet.
I've been working on the the module module Mapping since I became a maintainer a few days ago. I'm doing tests on a UI for this module, and my next step is rewriting the module Leaflet, as it does not meet my requirements for a personal project involving Solr. I like using Solr, and I've already sent some patches to geofiled to improve it. Some of the code I've sent was better used not applying my patch, and there was also another patch which I'm list in the git commit as the author. I plan sending new patches as I'm very involved in this Solr + maps integration and I hope many people find useful this new Leaflet module I'm writing.
The good things I want on mapping I'm working on to fix them. One thing I would like to see improved, but I'm not going to work on is geofield separating its functionalities into submodules Issue #2067573
My plans are: make Mapping module a good module for Leaflet and Openlayers (maybe a lot more can use it, too); rewriting the Leaflet module to be a good option for Solr integration and using the UI provided by Mapping module; launch my personal project (which I already got the concept running).

That all sounds great,

Posted by Brandonian on August 19, 2013 at 1:57pm

That all sounds great, @Mac_Weber. Once I get a stable 2.0 release of Geofield out the door, I'm definitely interested in contributing to the discussion of the Mapping module. If there's enough interest, maybe we can get a separate thread/chat/video call going on the subject?

In regards to #3 (split out proximity stuff in geofield into submodule), interesting idea, I'll follow up in that thread.

Of course!

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 19, 2013 at 3:09pm

The most difficult part on Mapping was to fully understand Ctools and get its integration to work. I'm trying to do it following all coding standards, but Ctools doesn't allow it in many cases.

I've pushed some code yesterday which I was testing using an unreleased UI for Mapping. As it seems there is no problems on the main module, it is now public. Of course, it still needs improvements to be fully usable.

Today I plan to push the first draft of Mapping Leaflet. It will speed up the process to get it into a full project (Mapping already is). In addition, it will also help me to code the needed improvements on Mapping. Having this dependent module I will detect issues faster than just using theoretical thinking.

@Brandonian, you already was listed as maintainer with git powers on Mapping when @zzolo gave me the module's ownership. It would be really cool if we could discuss these improvements and work together. I know @zzolo does not have time/interest for now.

Mapping initiatives

Posted by RdeBoer on August 18, 2013 at 12:09am

To answer the 4 questions:

Last country I visited was the USA (DrupalCon Portland). I stayed a bit longer. Shared some great presentations (about maps!), dinners and drinks with people I knew in the Drupal community but had never met. Hired a car with one of them and explored the beautiful mountains and vineyards East of Portland. A new business initiative came out of that visit as well. Looking forward to DrupalCon Prague and the countries I'll visit before I arrive there: Spain, Italy, Switserland.
As mentioned above by Brandonian (thanks for the praise Brandon, you're too kind), I am keen to get a mapping solution out in D8 ASAP. Ideally when D8 core is ready, a lot of D8 contrib should be ready. The best way to make that happen is to just do it. Finalising D8 Leaflet as I write this. So within days you can use a snazzy mapping solution in D8, well before D8 is out officially: Geofield + Leaflet + Leaflet More Maps + Leaflet MarkerCluster.
It would be great to have one mapping solution that is lightweight, scaleable, integrates with legacy and future Drupal modules and third parties and does "everything" including snappy marker clustering up to 100,000 markers. I don't think this is realistic. There are so many aspects to mapping. Developers have concentrated on various aspects of it and over the years this has resulted in many modules with a lot of overlap (see https://drupal.org/node/1704948, which has a lot on it, but is incomplete at the same time). However, maybe a well thought out set of loosely coupled modules (or in fact classes) could go a long way towards a solution where you only "pay" for what you need. For any new big mapping initiatives I would target D8 more so than D7.
Over the next month I hope to work more on maps in D8. We need Geocoder and ideally Address Field to be ported to D8 to complete the first D8 mapping solution. I find maps beautiful and am exploring ways for maps to become the central mechanism to navigate certain Drupal sites, as opposed to menus. I'm also experimenting with maps as a more engaging and more thought-provoking way to visualise data that is traditionally reported through boring tables.

kudos rik! i also just saw

Posted by dasjo on August 19, 2013 at 1:12pm

kudos rik!

i also just saw your planet post:
http://flink.com.au/ramblings/combatting-technical-debt-drupal-d8

i'd love to read more about some technical details. what are the plans for mapping contrib in D8? so far, have you done straight ports of the D7 modules? what is getting refactored, what is easier now and where are the pain points?

Yep they're straight ports from D7 to D8 to create some momentum

Posted by RdeBoer on August 19, 2013 at 6:26pm

.... or as straight as they can be. The nature of D8 is that all fields, widgets and formatters become PSR-0 classes etc... so there is already some refactoring in that for starters. I just updated this documentation page, as some core stuff was changed again since the last time: https://drupal.org/node/1985716.

hi folks! thanks @brandonian

Posted by dasjo on August 19, 2013 at 1:09pm

hi folks!

thanks @brandonian for yet another great initiative. i think this async-style office hours is a great complement, especially when lots of people are in holidays here in europe :)

let me answer your questions:

1) my last travel was hungary. you may know, that i travelled quite a bit with drupal in central america (http://www.dasjo.at/drupal-tour), attended various camps and cons all over europe and was very glad to spend 2,5 weeks in portland thanks to a scholarship for last drupalcon. this time my travel was just about spending some days with friends at an electronic music festival. it was located at lovely balaton lake, which coincidentally just hosted a drupalcamp by our hungarian friends http://drupalaton.eu/

i generally love combining work with travel, so if anyone is interested in booking me for some drupal consulting, let's get in touch with some time ahead to plan things properly :)

maybe i can make it to DrupalPicchu 2014, January in Peru. this is an awesome community effort to compensate for the cancelled DrupalCon south america and shows how vibrant latin american drupal communities are in the recent years: https://groups.drupal.org/node/257563

btw. if you want to visit my hometown vienna, we are just about to announce drupalcamp vienna for november 2013. you can already have a look at the website
http://2013.drupalcamp.at/

2) since finishing geocluster & presenting at drupalcon portland, i haven't spent much time in mapping contrib space to be honest. i have talked a bit with batje and you can see from his comments that working on such a stack is not so trivial. https://groups.drupal.org/node/311953#comment-951203

i have talked a bit with mac weber on his plans on the mapping module but i'm still not sure what would be the right approach (see next point).

finally i have played more with mapbox as a non-drupal mapping stack. check out my project http://dasjo.github.io/austria_flood/

3) i personally fear that too much abstraction between library configuration for leaflet and openlayers won't really help us in the long run but rather slow down development. my personal perception over the last years was that Drupal hasn't really innovated much in mapping space. we tend to copy what outside javascript mapping world is creating and are therefore trying to keep up with mainstream.

based on this observation and the limited resources that we seem to have, i think the best would be to continue our approach of moving from monolothic systems (location module) towards integration of interoperable pieces (geofield + geocoder + etc).

we should identify tasks that currently get repeated in different mapping modules (configure a map, add views configuration, show a map, ...). so i guess my favorite mapping module would be a set of helpers that allow leaflet, openlayers or other drupal mapping integrations to reuse some of those common tasks. that of course is a very high-level view as i haven't thought through the details :)

also solr / search api / apache solr module and bbox query arguments seem like candidates for reuse across different modules. we might want to split out some functionality from views_geojson that applies to any view based on geo-data.

4) i would like to engage with mapping drupallers at drupalcon prague.

see my proposal "Mapping sprint: Improve geo contrib modules & documentation"
https://prague2013.drupal.org/sprints/mapping-sprint-improve-geo-contrib...

on a related note, i think there are quite a number of things that we could improve in geocluster. i might be able to support contributors in the queue but to really push things forward i would like to ask those people that have really a need for geocluster to sit together with me and hash out a plan.

well that's it from me so far :)

i know i have touched various parts, just pick one and let's keep this discussion flowing.

we should identify tasks that

Posted by Brandonian on August 19, 2013 at 2:01pm

we should identify tasks that currently get repeated in different mapping modules (configure a map, add views configuration, show a map, ...). so i guess my favorite mapping module would be a set of helpers that allow leaflet, openlayers or other drupal mapping integrations to reuse some of those common tasks. that of course is a very high-level view as i haven't thought through the details :)

I think this is key. I've had some discussions with various people about how we might achieve that. The TL;DR version is thinking about the module as strictly glue code between Drupal and some sort of library that can take config code and convert it into a map, something kind of like http://trifacta.github.io/vega/, but strictly for building maps independent of the rendering library (Leaflet, Openlayers, Google, superfantastic neato custom library that hasn't been built yet, etc).

i think your approach mainly

Posted by dasjo on August 19, 2013 at 2:17pm

i think your approach mainly focuses on storing map configurations (i believe that was the main intend of the mapping module originally).

i'd like to bring some tasks into the perspective that geofield partly handles at the moment, views_geojson does some and leaflet + openlayers have their takes on it:
views integration.

i 'd like to see, if we can consolidate geofield_views, leaflet_views and openlayers_views and reduce them to just converting the data into a consumable format required by the javascript mapping library.

http://drupalcode.org/project/leaflet.git/tree/refs/heads/7.x-1.x:/leafl...
http://drupalcode.org/project/openlayers.git/tree/refs/heads/7.x-2.x:/mo...
http://drupalcode.org/project/geofield.git/tree/refs/heads/7.x-2.x:/views
http://drupalcode.org/project/views_geojson.git/tree/refs/heads/7.x-1.x

does this make sense?

Very much so. I'm not 100%

Posted by Brandonian on August 19, 2013 at 2:38pm

Very much so. I'm not 100% sold on it living in something like mapping.module yet, but I could be convinced. IMHO, it makes sense to live with something like Geofield because there are valid use cases for generating that kind of data outside of mapping (migrations, external library integration, general listings of nearly locations, etc).

you are right, ideally, the

Posted by dasjo on August 19, 2013 at 3:11pm

you are right, ideally, the views integration can be used by any module / user that wants to query geospatial data. this doesn't necessarily require "mapping" as a visual mean to represent geospatial data.

if we go that route and define "mapping" as visual-only, my dreaming of little-mapping-helpers would rather go into something called differently. we could reuse the "geo" namespace and explicitly state that since 7.x or 8.x, there is a separate geofield that depends on the geo "helper" module, if necessary.

note that we already depend on geoPHP, but this library doesn't have any drupal context. well one more dependency to make things more reusable :P

edit: i might have missed one point: i don't think we should put everything into geofield, because i'm thinking that location can also stem from different sources like external views data or externally indexed data in solr or some geospatial database...

Mapping module discussion

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 19, 2013 at 5:42pm

It became a big discussion about Mapping module and its possible integration with other modules.

I just created a poll to figure out the best time we can do a goog hangout to better discuss it http://doodle.com/4rcwut7vs8mrr6xy#table

Travel, Geoplans in Drupal

Posted by robertwb on August 20, 2013 at 3:16pm

My wife and I took a trip with friends to Belgium and France two years ago. We spent a week cycling through Alsace, a week relaxing in Beaune, and a week exploring Brussels and Gent. Biking, Wine, Beer, Food, sight-seeing and subjecting the locals to my pidgin French - one of the best vacations ever!
I have been working on hydrologic models of projected water use in my home state of Virginia, USA - looking at changes to river flows and aquatic life over a 30-50 year time frame. All of our planning data is entered into Drupal, 100s of thousands of data points, and our models query drupal to get parameters. Now I am working on bringing the results back from the models and into Drupal, with mapping help for visualization. Currently, the results are "loosely couple" with drupal using WFS, but I want to more tightly couple and having robust data mapping capabilities in Drupal is a must. Here is one of my current WFS/WMS hacks: http://deq3.bse.vt.edu/d.test/?q=test-result-map/18470
I wish that the OpenLayers layers that access WMS maps could take dynamic parameters for the URL from context variables when used in a view.
I want to gain enough understanding of the entity relationships code and the geoPHP code to begin setting out a roadmap for developing spatial-relationships plugin for Views.

#3 - it can

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 20, 2013 at 4:05pm

use context filters

Thanks for the response. I

Posted by robertwb on August 20, 2013 at 6:07pm

Thanks for the response. I think that my #3 may not have been stated clearly. While context filters work nicely within Drupal, and even when using the OpenLayers module, I would like to be able to alter the URL of my WFS layer to contain some added parameters submitted as contextual parameter to the view. So, the drupal page:

http://deq3.bse.vt.edu/d.test/?q=test-result-map/18470

Shows my WMS map underlayed with my Drupal contained spatial coverage node 18470. However, what I would like to do is to pass some additional parameters to the remote WMS service, in this case, I am visualizing model data, and the default parameter is something called "auglowflow", but I would like to be able see the parameter "7q10" instead. So, this:

http://deq3.bse.vt.edu/d.test/?q=test-result-map/18470/parameter=7q10

would ideally pass the URL variable "parameter=7q10" to my WMS service. But unless there is a extension for the OpenLayers WMS that allows this, I can see no way to do it - and mayhaps this is a cross-site scripting risk?

In other words, it seems that the OpenLayers layer, once defined in Drupal has a static URI, beyond the spatial BBOX things.

r.b.

not related to the thread,

Posted by batje on August 21, 2013 at 7:39am

not related to the thread, but have you seen what Tom from DevSeed left us with http://drupal.org/project/wfs It allows you to expose Drupal data as a WFS layer. (that you can then use in geoserver to render)

Its d6 and barely working, but a nice starting point.

(and can you refrain from using r.b. in your sig, its highly confusing)

Reinier Battenberg

thanks for the heads up on

Posted by robertwb on August 21, 2013 at 11:10am

thanks for the heads up on this. I like the fact that it flows from views.

b.r.

It is possible

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 21, 2013 at 1:05pm

You can still use context filter handled by custom Views handler.
OL and Views are coded in an architecture that is very open to plugins, making it easy to code custom stuff.

That's what I figured, I just

Posted by robertwb on August 21, 2013 at 2:30pm

That's what I figured, I just put it on #3 cuz it asked for "wishes" - I might "wish" that I would get around to writing a plugin to accomplish my desire, which might happen, perhaps before I get to my own #4.

Thanks for the guidance,
/r/b

Mapping hangout

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 21, 2013 at 3:33pm

I will talk about Mapping today https://groups.drupal.org/node/312598
Everyone is welcome to join.

Please consider cross-posting

Posted by christefano on August 21, 2013 at 9:14pm

Please consider cross-posting this Drupal Mapping Office Hours post to the Drupal Hospitality Network group:

https://groups.drupal.org/hospitality-network

That group has a lot of travel-minded individuals. A number of folks in the group are brainstorming a Couchsurfing.com or Warmshowers.org clone that incorporates mapping:

https://groups.drupal.org/node/303593

I missed this post, but here

Posted by Mac_Weber on August 23, 2013 at 4:05pm

I missed this post, but here are the hangout notes https://groups.drupal.org/node/312598#comment-952978

I also published sandbox code for Mapping Leaflet. Reviews are welcome to make it a full project: https://drupal.org/node/2072333