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Holiday cottages on Drupal

Manx farm holidays in Smeale, Isle of ManLast night saw the launch of the new Smeale Farm Cottages website (first launched back in 2000), helping market a new holiday cottage that they recently opened.

The new site features an improved availability calendar that makes it both easier to maintain and easier for visitors to understand as well as the ability for the customer to edit any of the pages themselves whenever they want to change any of the information.

Also featured is a location map thanks to data from the OpenStreetMap project.

As you might expect, the website is built using the Drupal open source content management system with the addition of the image module, a customised version of the zen theme and a heavily customised availability module to drive the calendars.

I'm hoping to release this availability calendar module back to the community as a new module in the near future.

Posted in , , at 7:41 PM on Thursday 7 February 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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How the GeoCMSs compare

At the State of the Map conference it was great to be able to meet up with two guys who also have interests in creating geographically able content management systems (GeoCMS), Andrew Turner who created the GeoPress plugin for MovableType and WordPress and Henri Bergius who is one of the founders of the Midgard CMS.

Before their talk on GeoClue we had a good opportunity to sit down and talk through some of the current functionality of the different systems, see where they differ, and try to agree on some common base functionality that we felt should be present across the different platforms.

The features included things like ability to save a location (obviously), how many locations could be used to reference each post, the presence of maps and which providers they used, the ability to post location information through the blogging API, the inclusion of Microformats (hCard), syndication formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc.), OpenSearch capabilities, reverse geocoding of coordinates to give place information, posting by email, and a couple of others.

When I get a chance I'm going to build up a table over on the Geospatial Content Management System Wikipedia page to compare the systems we talked about (WordPress, Midgard and Drupal) but also others such as Joomla, TikiWiki and Plone. Any input on those would be much appreciated as I haven't done much with them to date.

Update: I didn't notice that Henri had already blogged a little about this, and after the conference went off and added maps to Midgard using Mapstraction... cool!

Posted in , , at 5:06 PM on Wednesday 18 July 2007 | Comments (1)
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Track OpenStreetMap diaries through RSS

A year ago I was really interested in seeing the community aspect of the OpenStreetMap website improve, and the recent update to Rails brought a lot of the functionality that I was looking for, with space to be tweaked and improved upon. Since I started to learn Ruby on Rails recently, what better way was there to help, but build on the functionality that others have put in already.

I outlined some ideas on the wiki and decided that some of my first priorities would be adding RSS to the diaries, making them easier to post to, improving the user profiles and also the messaging interface. I've added a few small changes over the past few days, but today saw the release of the biggest one so far: an RSS feed for all diary entries, so you can now subscribe to updates of everyone mapping on OpenStreetMap. Over time I'm also hoping to add other feeds for individual diaries, for your friends and also for those mapping nearby.

If you haven't used OpenStreetMap's diary feature, now is the time to give it a try and let people know what you're working on mapping at the moment. Right now, you can post to it by viewing your own diary (through your account page) and clicking on 'new post', but I'll be looking to make it easier for users to post as well.

Update: looks like it needs a little tweaking still, but the basics are there.

Posted in , at 10:06 AM on Tuesday 12 June 2007 | Comments (2)
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Design for geodan.org

Design for geodan.orgGeodan.org has a new theme, for the most part at least. I got the basics done on Monday night having begun with the basic bluemarine theme that Drupal ships with and has enabled by default. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted to acheive with the theme and it didn't take me too long to get it into a state that I was relatively happy with.

It's best viewed in Firefox or Safari at the moment as I can't get the opacity levels to have any effect in Internet Explorer. It's just no good if you can't see the earth through the body of the page (thanks go to NASA for that beautiful Blue Marble image of the earth).

Posted in , , at 11:11 PM on Wednesday 23 August 2006 | Comments (0)
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Drupal geospatial testbed

It's been long enough that I've been working with Drupal and not had a site of my own that runs off it. I'd love to migrate dankarran.com to Drupal but it would take some time to migrate. So for now I will leave this site as it is and create a new site aimed at demonstrating Drupal as a Geospatial Content Management System.

geodan.org will be a testbed for geospatial functionality within Drupal. I'll be using existing modules such as the location module which gives a basis for handling geographic information about users and nodes in a site, gmap module which allows for Google Maps to be easily created, as well as a number of others. In addition to these I'll be adding the KML module I've been working on as part of my day job, and also the WFS Server module which still has a little way to go before it's ready.

Right now it's just a shell, but over time it will grow. And as it seems somebody over at the OGC recently picked up on my last post about Drupal as a WFS I should try and make that sooner rather than later...

Posted in , , , at 12:09 PM on Monday 21 August 2006 | Comments (0)
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Stuttgart JAG site launch

Preview of Jugend Arbeitsgruppe Greenpeace Stuttgart website

One of my colleagues reminded me today that I hadn't linked to the Drupal site I mentioned last week. So, here's the link to the Jugend Arbeitsgruppe Greenpeace Stuttgart, a site for youths in Stuttgart interested in Greenpeace.

It's still not quite polished, but I think it's looking pretty good for now.

Posted in , at 10:45 PM on Tuesday 1 August 2006 | Comments (0)
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My first paid Drupal site

Over the past week I've been working on building, theming and tweaking a new Drupal site for a friend. It's my first paid (as in, with chocolate) Drupal-based website outside of the ones we maintain at work, and it was great to be able to put into practice some of the tips and tricks I've picked up over the past eight months or so.

I'm quite pleased with the amount of work that Drupal removes from creating a website (steep learning curve aside), and how flexible it is out of the box, without even beginning to look into the many modules that you can plug and play with the framework. I'd say the majority of the time spent working on the site has been walking my friend through, showing her how to add new content, link it all together and all that good stuff.

The site went live today but isn't quite polished, so I'll leave the link off for now. At least until I've had a chance to make all those last minute tweaks that inevitably don't show up until you leave the nice comfortable environment of Safari and Firefox and see the thing torn to pieces in Internet Explorer.

Posted in , at 11:14 PM on Tuesday 25 July 2006 | Comments (0)
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Learning about AJAX

Mapping my photosIn order to improve the interactivity of my photo map, I have been learning about different ways of linking the information that comes from my database of photos and the mapping data which comes from the Google Maps API to what the user is doing.

Using a mixture of technologies that are commonly known as AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), I have allowed the list of nearby locations - which shows to the right of the map - to update itself whenever the user moves the map around the screen. It will show a list of 5 places closest to the centre of the map and also the distance they are from the centre.

One next stage of development will be to allow the user to click on one of these name and automatically zoom the map to the right area, along with other features including improving what is actually shown on the map for each place.

Some of these new mapping features will probably require broadband to be able to enjoy them properly because they can be quite data intensive.

Posted in , , , at 11:48 PM on Tuesday 5 July 2005 | Comments (1)
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Awaiting my Canon EOS 300D

Canon EOS 300DLast week I decided to upgrade my camera. Having had my trusty Fujifilm S602 Zoom for almost two and a half years, I decided I really wanted the flexibility of a digital SLR camera. I chose to upgrade to a Canon EOS 300D which is a camera that has come highly recommended for a while but is also on offer for an unbelievable price right now. It offers the flexibility I'm after, with the ability to change lenses and upgrade where necessary. I've had the desire to upgrade for a while now but pricing has been an issue - being a student I don't have too much money available, although the bits of web development work I do on the side certainly helps.

I'm looking forward to the camera arriving so that I can experiment with it. I had my heart set on receiving it today but it didn't show up in the post - hopefully tomorrow! This reminds me very much of the time I was waiting eagerly for my Fujifilm camera and it didn't turn up when expected.

Posted in , at 11:01 PM on Thursday 31 March 2005 | Comments (0)
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