Mapping with Drupal

Preface

Audience

This book is intended for people building Drupal websites who would like to visualize their content on a map. Maps are powerful and can tell a rich story. A map is instantly readable, but at the same time almost infinitely revealing. With the rise of maps on the Internet and now on cell phones, the way we navigate our lives has changed. Recognizing this, more web developers are integrating location into websites and applications.

Drupal is a versatile content management system, and because of that, it has been extended through many contributed modules to support mapping. Drupal is not primarily a mapping platform, however, so mapping in Drupal can be tricky. But because Drupal is so extendable, mapping in Drupal can be adapted to your specific needs. This book will help you navigate these complexities to create beautiful and engaging maps.

By the end of this book, you will be able to create a website with a map that automatically centers on the user’s location. The map will include events and local groups that have been added through intuitive interfaces. Rather than using one of the maps from Google or Bing that have become so familiar, perhaps you will create a custom base map that fits the color scheme of your site. And rather than some pink pins, the events and local groups shown on your map will be marked with custom icons created for your site.

We assume you know how to install Drupal, install contributed modules, and enable themes; maybe you have already built a site that is used publicly. If you have not done these things or feel you do not have a great grasp on Drupal, don’t stop reading this book just yet. Read over the first few chapters to get a feel for what is possible, take that enthusiasm and read over some other tutorials or books to learn the basics of site building with Drupal, and then come back. There are some great titles to get you started working with Drupal, some of which are listed in Appendix A. But don’t worry, we will try our best to not assume too much.

Later in this book, we will look at writing code to extend existing mapping modules. When we get there, we will assume you know a little about writing Drupal modules; at a minimum you should understand how to create a simple custom module for a site and be familiar with Drupal hooks. If you are new to writing Drupal modules, there are some books listed in Appendix A that will help you get up to speed developing for Drupal.