Wordpress as a CMS

We (my team and I) just finished a little prototype effort between Zekiah and FortiusOne that required a private instance of GeoCommons that meshed up nicely with a Wordpress UI. The deal with Wordpress (if you don’t already know) is that it’s a pretty robust blogging platform which means that you can add your own content and syndicate it out as needed but the core software is pretty limited if you want to privatize the data you’re serving out.

The Project:

Green Mountain Falls, Colorado is a little municipality in the middle-of-nowhere Colorado but they do have a requirement to serve up their proprietary geospatial data to both the general public and then to those who really need it like their Fire and Police Departments.  I won’t go in to why the GMF data is private as certain geo-type people go richter over the whole “my data is private” issue, but I will say that GMF does have their reasons. We begged and pleaded with the folks at FortiusOne to work with us on this endeavor because their core technology is absolutely what the doctor ordered. There are a lot of reasons why GeoCommons (GC) was the best solution so I will only elaborate on a few.

1. GeoCommons is literally so easy a cave man can do it. With a private instance, we were able to upload our own data and show/hide it as needed in the final UI.
2. You can pick and choose from your own base maps so Google, Bing and OSM are all options to use for your final compiled cartogram.
3. Cartography, cartography, cartography!!! You gotta give it to the F1 team…they’ve provided a robust desktop-like GIS symbolization and thematic mapping experience on the web and in this case all in a private instance of GC in the Cloud.

The Problem:

Green Mountain Falls has private data…These data are from their roads network and also in their unique way of representing parcels in the town. I’d have to refer to another source to fully explain this whole thing…Bottom line is that all of their geospatial data could not be 100% open to the rest of the world. Like I mentioned earlier, we stored it a private instance or GeoCommons and then applied some role-based authentication to the layers using the GeoCommons API and a couple pieces of Wordpress magic.

Wordpress has literally thousands of plugins that you can pick and choose from to run and enhance your blog. We weren’t interested in SEO or any of that other jazz that really helps your site get noticed! We were interested in safe-guarding the data. In Wordpress, there are two plugins in particular that will allow you to do this!

Capability Manager – The Capability Manager plugin provides a simple way to manage role capabilities. Using it, you will be able to change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles. You can also delegate capabilities management to other users. In this case, some restrictions apply to this users, as them can only set/unset the capabilities they have. With the Backup/Restore tool, you can save your Roles and Capabilities before making changes and revert them if something goes wrong. You’ll find it on the Tools menu. At the current version, you cannot manage capabilities at user level (only can be managed for roles). This will be included in next versions.

The Capabilities Manager gave us an easy way to create and assign new roles to GMF users. I encourage everyone to check this plugin out!

User Access Manager – With the “User Access Manager”-plugin you can manage the access to your posts, pages and files. You only create a user group, put registered users to this and set up the rights for this group. From now on the post/page is only accessible and writable for the specified group. This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere.

With UAM, we were able to show and hide Wordpress pages so that only certain Users and User Groups could see them.

How did you mashup your GeoCommons Maps?

Simple! Just like Google, Bing and Yahoo, GeoCommons allows you to embed your map directly in to your own website! See the graphic below…Note: in the map you create, you can select the “Details” button in the top-right corner of the screen which will present you with the code to embed your map. Copy and paste and you’re set!

Embedding GeoCommons Maps!

Sample code to embed a GeoCommons map in to your own website is as follows…

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<style>#maker_map_1809 {width: 100%; height: 100%;}</style>
  <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://maker.geocommons.com/javascripts/embed.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
  Maker.maker_host='http://maker.geocommons.com';Maker.finder_host='http://finder.geocommons.com';Maker.core_host='http://core.geocommons.com';
  Maker.load_map("maker_map_1809", "1809");
</script>
<div class="geocommons_map" id="maker_map_1809"></div><br />
<a class="geocommons_map_link" id="maker_map_1809_link" href="http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/1809">View full map</a>

I’d really like to thank Kate Chapman, Andrew Turner and the folks on the Zekiah team (you know who you are) for helping to put this proof of concept together! Wanna see the Green Mountain Falls site in action? Geez…Click on the screen grab below to access it!

Green Mountain Falls, Colorado

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