[ckan-dev] Important update on geospatial view plugins

Thu May 7 17:01:17 UTC 2015

Hi everybody,

tl; dr:
* Geospatial views now live in https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-geoview
* New OpenLayers based viewer with support form many formats
* If you are using the GeoJSON view plugin you'll need to update your instance

One of the common complaints from users when enabling spatial features
was that for just enabling the GeoJSON view plugin you had to install
ckanext-spatial. Even when simplified to not needing to install
PostGIS, it still was a bit of a faff.

We've decided to consolidate all geospatial views in ckanext-geoview.
This includes the existing Leaflet based GeoJSON view plugin [1] (see
below if you are currently using it) and also a new OpenLayers based
viewer [2]. This has been developed on top of the great work that
Philippe Duchesne started a while ago, and allows viewing resources of
type WMS, WFS, KML, GML among others.

There is still some work to be done, so if you have experience with
OpenLayers and Leaflet have a look at the open issues or add new ones!
[3]

Current users of the `geojson_view` (or `geojson_preview`) plugin will
need to install the new extension and update the source of
ckanext-spatial. This essentially boils down to running the following
in your virtualenv folder (with the virtualenv activated):

pip install ckanext-geoview
cd ckanext-spatial
git pull
python setup.py develop

The ckanext-spatial Troubleshooting section [4] has been updated with
potential issues that could be found during the update.

Let me know if you find any problem.

Thanks,

Adrià

[1] https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-geoview#leaflet-geojson-viewer
[2] https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-geoview#openlayers-viewer
[3] https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-geoview/issues
[4] https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-spatial/blob/master/doc/install.rst#troubleshooting