Geo-referencing content types in Plone with collective.geo

Where is my content?

Who am I?

I'm senior developer and project manager with Abstract since 2011

I have been working with Plone since 2007

During the last years I have gained experience with various Python web development frameworks

Web maps: when, why and how

What is collective.geo

What if c.geo was not there

collective.geo manifesto

Use cases

Use the location field

ENEA

We can use the location field of a content-type to geo-locate the offices of a company

• Archetypes
• collective.geo

http://www.enea.it

Dexterity content types TTW

Tropical Data Hub

We can assign collective.geo Maps behaviour to a Dexterity content-type in order to make it geo-referenceable

• Dexterity
• collective.geo.behaviour

http://tropicaldatahub.org/

Not only points

IW:LEARN

c.geo allows to geo-reference content with different shapes

• Points
• Lines
• Polygons

http://iwlearn.net/

Flexitopic

We can aggregate geo-referenced contents with a Plone collection and, with flexitopic, we can show the results on a table and paginate them

• collective.flexitopic
• c.geo.flexitopic

More customizations

AORIF

The modular structure of collective.geo allows us to customize it in a simple way

On saving a content we can geolocate its address and show it on a map. The user doesn't need to know the coordinates neither to use a complex UI.

Backend/frontend

We can use a different javascript map services to display contents.

• Google maps
• Polymaps http://polymaps.org/
• Leaflet http://leaflet.cloudmade.com
• Kartograph http://kartograph.org

http://ferraraterraeacqua.it/

Plone.it - users' map

We can also view the portal users in a specific map

With a portlet we can include the map in a different context such as a landing page.

• collective.geo.usersmap

http://plone.it/partecipa

Looking for my content

  <subscriber
    handler=".MySubscriber"
    for="IObjectGeoreferencedEvent"
  />
          

collective.geo under the hood

The core of collective.geo

[buildout]
extends = http://dist.plone.org/release/4.2.1/versions.cfg

eggs =
  collective.geo.bundle
  BeautifulSoup
...
        

collective.geo structure

collective.geo.openlayers

Includes the javascript library Openlayers in Plone and some other javascripts that are useful for managing maps in collective.geo

layer = new OpenLayers.Layer.Google(
  'Google maps',
  {
    'sphericalMercator':true,
    numZoomLevels:20
  }
)

collective.geo.geographer

  >>> class Placemark(object):
  ...     implements(
  ...       IGeoreferenceable,
  ...       IAttributeAnnotatable
  ...     )

  >>> placemark = Placemark()

  >>> geo = IGeoreferenced(placemark)
  >>> geo.setGeoInterface('Point',
  ...               (-105.08, 40.59))
          

collective.geo.settings

store default settings for collective.geo

• map center
• zoom level
• which layers have to be shown on the map
• which contents can be georeferenced
• default styles for all features

collective.geo.mapwidget

• manages the mechanism that handles Openlayers maps in Plone
• each map widget is a Zope component which contains a series of layers
• all the maps in collective.geo are composed by one or more map layers and each layer returns a javascript snippet by a page template which contains all information about the layer itself

collective.geo.mapwidget

>>> from collective.geo.mapwidget import maplayer
>>> class BingStretMapLayer(maplayer.MapLayer):
...     name = u"bing_map"
...     Title = _(u'Bing Streets')
...     type = 'bing'
...     jsfactory = """
...       function() {
...         return new OpenLayers.Layer.VirtualEarth('%s',
...           {'type': VEMapStyle.Shaded,
...            'sphericalMercator': true});
...       }""" % Title
        

<metal:layer
    use-macro="context/@@collectivegeo-macros/map-widget" />
        

collective.geo.kml

registers a kml view on the georeferenced objects and on folderish contents such as Folders and Collections.

the KML file can be used on external services like Google Earth/Maps

Dexterity

collective.z3cform.mapwidget

it's a specific widget for z3c.form that allows to manage the geographic data in an easy way

collective.geo.behaviour

it's a Dexterity behaviour that allows to georeference contents and uses the annotations mechanism of collective.geo.geographer for registering data

More extensions

collective.geo.mapcontent

collective.geo.file

it provides a view for KML, KMZ (Keyhole Markup Language) and GPX (GPS eXchange Format) files.

The view renders the file in a openlayers Map using the collective.geo library.

Conclusion

• 7 packages on the core (two more for Dexterity soon)
• 9 addons packages
• translated in 9 languages
• Coactivate http://www.coactivate.org/projects/collectivegeo
• Readthedocs http://collectivegeo.readthedocs.org

Contributors