Mapping - the story and progress
This page pulls together news on the situation with maps on CanalPlanAC. It's designed to answer all general questions and can be linked to from bug reports, forum questions, Facebook and so on.
Latest update: 27 December 2018
Background
In the summer Google introduced a charging regime for their maps. The amount of use that CanalPlanAC makes of maps means that we cannot afford to show them any more. We are committed to keeping CanalPlanAC free at the point of use and not introducing any form of tiered "membership".
The good news is that we have found a solution involving hosting our own tiles derived from Open Street Map, supplementing them with a "layer" we generate ourselves from CanalPlanAC data. When complete this will actually give us better maps, a more unified interface, reduce the amount of custom JavaScript that needs maintaining and add new features. We will also be making several versions of the data available for others to use if they want.
But of course it will take time, and at the moment several features are missing. We're sorry about this and are doing what we can.
Our current expectation is to have completed the migration around the end of the year.
Status
The current situation with mapping on CanalPlanAC is:
| Gazetteer - find place | complete and enhanced |
| Gazetteer - places | complete |
| Gazetteer - waterway | complete |
| Gazetteer - features | has never had maps. Will add maps later |
| Gazetteer - "show links" functionality for marker places | fails with JS error |
| Gazetteer - addresses | complete - uses new geocoder |
| Route planning - overview | complete |
| Route planning - daily maps | complete |
| Route planning - itinerary | complete |
| Route planning - PDF | complete |
| Route planning - virtual cruise | complete |
| Data editing - add place between two existing places | complete |
| Data editing - extend a waterway | complete |
| Data editing - all other aspects of adding places involving marker places | complete |
| Furthest place | completed |
| Major edit - add isolated place | complete - includes new geocoder as well as maps |
| Major edit - add publication | "show" fails |
Mapping infrastructure: plans and progress
Done
- Server installed
- Background tiles sourced
- CanalPlanAC tiles can be generated
- Full configuration so that appropriate locations are automatically used for development, beta and live systems
- CanalPlanAC tiles are regenerated whenever the data is changed
- Style sheet is template based and matches place and waterway types, including excluded waterways
- Downloads are available - manual list from wiki, if you are logged on
- Now using
Extra bits
- Integrate stoppages
- Fix options for maps
- Need to pull back intermediate lines (or find those waterways that have changed and regenerate them)