A quick shout-out to fellow Plonista David Siedband, whose recently-launched project BayNature.org is a beautiful, innovative example of what a Plone-powered an online magazine can be.
Not only does BayNature.org have all of the “normal” features you’d expect from an online magazine, including articles, videos, an online store, an events calendar, etc., but David’s also built an innovative map-based view of all of the site content — entirely appropriate for a magazine whose content is all very place-based!
This is a great example of what’s possible when an organization with great content connects with the right combination of design, information architecture , website development and GIS talent. Nice work, David & BayNature team!
COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
Says Drew Bernard on July 17, 2008 at 5:32 pmWhat a beautiful site. I love the map. Is that code borrowable?
Says Jon Stahl on July 18, 2008 at 8:11 amI’m pretty sure there’s a full-power GIS engine underneath, so borrowing is possible, but non-trivial.
Says David Siedband on July 19, 2008 at 11:31 pmWe managed to avoid MapServer et. al. and instead use custom javascript on top of GoogleMaps. The secret sauce there was using a clustering script to manage the placemarks, and figuring out sub-sets that made sense for the 2,000+ places. That enabled us to achieve sane rendering and delivery times for the KML files.
The code is GPL’d and available here:
http://svn.baynature.org
http://trac.baynature.org/browserWe’d love to hear back if anyone reuses our code for something cool
Big props to Jennifer Strahan from GreenInfo Network for the map collab, Bay Nature Editor Dan Rademacher for his flexibility in (re)defining the challenges in ways that made them solvable, and Mani Sheriar for the stunning visual design and collab in making an intuitive and elegant UI.
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