Yesterday was day 2 of the hackfest, and we did a number of improvements :
- Cities can now be searched in an efficient way, thanks to the usage of Nominatim. The “Administrative city” field has been turned into a small search engine that returns, through Javascript, the list of cities matching the request. We spent quite some time understanding the results of Nomimatim and how they relate to the objects in the PostGIS database generated by osm2pgsql. We still need to fix a few issues with this Javascript-based search engine.
- We used to identify cities by their name, but this of course doesn’t work since many cities have the same name around the world. So, now, rendering of city by administrative boundary are identified by the OSM id of the polygon in the PostGIS database. OCitySMap has been modified consequently, and jobs submitted through MapOSMatic are properly handled by maposmaticd.
- The language used to generate a map can now be selected before generating the map, and several other improvements have been made on the internationalization. The main topic remaining is to pre-select the languages that are useful depending on the country in which the city being rendered is in.
- The slippy map integration has been reworked to post-pone the loading of the tiles so that the homepage of MapOSMatic is much faster to load.
- The documentation to install MapOSMatic and OCitySMap has been further improved.
- Several bugs or tasks waiting in our bug tracker have been fixed, and some cleanup has been done on bugs that were already fixed by previous development
We expect to put the new version into production tomorrow, with the main achievement of having world-wide support, a better city search feature, and internalization for maps. Of course, we’ll need a lot of contributions for the internationalization support.