Hey Matt, First off, I wanted to compliment you on your work so far. I have some personal interest in your project going back to one of my own undergrad projects (http://brown.edu/aaah/) and so was very excited to see you continuing development of your AfricaMap and WorldMap on an open platform that I help to develop.
I was asked to review the progress of your WorldMap alpha to see what we could learn in the continuing development of GeoNode. So, if you'll permit me, I'll further the conversation with some comments below. Cheers, Rolando -- Rolando Peñate Design Lead OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/ On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Matt Bertrand <[email protected]>wrote: > I've been developing a customized version of GeoNode called "WorldMap" for > Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis. Some of the new > features built so far include: > > - Search layer attributes by text and highlight matches on the map > - Specify which layer attributes should be searchable > > - Query layers by mouse click: display the selected feature's attributes > and outline it on the map. > - Set layer attribute titles that appears in query results > Both search and query are useful features but the results table feels a little crammed on the right-hand side, especially on my laptop. Have y'all considered attaching the table along the bottom instead? For example: http://projects.opengeo.org/geoext/wiki/GeoEditor Also, can you please point me at the interface for defining attribute titles? I can't seem to find it. - Display layers in a category tree > - Allow renaming and drag/drop of layers and categories > The categories are useful, especially when creating maps with lots of layers as is the case with the BostonMap or AfricaMap. Could you please point me at the interface for creating and managing these categories? Are they only generated based on the addition of new layers and then modified from there? > - Metadata link on layer properties window which redirects user to that > layer's description page > This is a good idea and we should implement in GeoNode as well. I'd suggest opening in a new tab or window though, to avoid losing unsaved changes to the map. For our reference: http://dev.geonode.org/trac/ticket/920 > - Display Picasa and YouTube feeds based on keywords assigned by the user > It took me a while to figure out what the Picasa and YouTube feeds in that little "More..." menu were all about. What was the motivation for creating a separate menu for what are essentially point layers instead of creating a "More..." (or "Social Web" or whatever) cateogry in the layer tree? This could also solve the weak connection between the field for defining keywords (in the map properties/metadata) and the layers themselves as Picasa or YouTube specific settings could be handled (independently) as layer properties. > - Introductory window on first visit to any map, with content determined by > the map owner. > Great idea, we should implement that as well to provide viewers with some context. I assume this is populated with the title and abstract from the metadata? I noticed that it still shows up when no description has been provided—you may want to make it conditional on their being content to show. For our records: http://dev.geonode.org/trac/ticket/922 - Assign layer/map access permissions to users by email address instead of > existing username: create accounts for the addresses if they don't already > exist and send an email with their username and temporary password > This is a nice idea and we should extend our permissions system ( http://dev.geonode.org/trac/ticket/864#comment:4) to allow for email addresses. We've also thought of something similar for our future groups workflow (http://dev.geonode.org/trac/wiki/Groups#a3.ManagerView). One question though, do you allow users to register multiple email addresses to their user account or is it a one-to-one relationship? It would perhaps be useful to allow users to register multiple email addresses, select a primary for notifications, and allow for some method of duplicate account resolution from the user profile (http://dev.geonode.org/trac/wiki/UserProfile) to prevent the proliferation of accounts. For our records: http://dev.geonode.org/trac/ticket/919 > The project is still in the alpha stage and there are plenty of kinks to > work out, but feel free to check it out if you're interested - you can visit > the website at http://worldmap.harvard.edu/alpha, it's currently running > on Amazon Web Services. The code is also available at > https://github.com/cga-harvard/cga-worldmap. Any feedback you can give > would be much appreciated. > I'm also told that y'all need ways of managing permissions through the map composer. My suggestion would be extend the Map Properties and Layer Properties dialogs with Permissions tabs that included forms (editable for managers, uneditable for plebes) for managing permissions. Also, in the layer panel on the left, I'd include links or icons for common functions (layer properties, remove layers/categories, etc) as the existence of context menus on the layer tree is not immediately obvious. > Many thanks to the GeoNode team for putting together a great platform and > making this possible! > And thank you for working with us to improve it! Cheers, R
