Planet Drupal

"I woke up this morning and all my shrimps was dead and gone. Someone's been fishing in my pond…" -- Robert Johnson

A few days ago I woke up to the latest version of D8 core, only to find that "everything" in my freshly ported fully operational D8 module was broken. While getting to the root course, I couldn't help grumbling the above words by the late great bluesman in his wonderful Dead Shrimp Blues. Replace "shrimps" by "hooks" and think of that "someone" as the D8 core team and you have a wonderful analogy.

The Drupal module Leaflet More Maps already offered a considerable set of over 20 attractive maps from a variety of providers, including high-res versions of Google Maps. All available at the click of a drop-down selector, when you have the Leaflet or IP Geolocation Views & Maps modules installed.

This is a follow-up on last week's article Spare a thought for contrib and the comments it attracted. The article invited the reader to reflect on the huge body of D7 Contrib modules that will have to be ported to a new core architecture in order to give D8 the same or even richer functionality as D7.

Here are, in summary, some of the comments the Drupal community made to that article:

Just ponder these statements for a while. No need to over-analyse:

I've just ported one of my D7 modules, Views Contextual Range Filter, to D8. Phew! That took longer than I'd hoped.

We can be a little cheeky at flink. Last year we wrote on these pages an article titled "27 reasons not to use Google Maps". Drawing from a variety of tile providers, it show-cased 27 alternatives to the by now rather stale look & feel of the Google-anno-2006 map.

Websites have no memories. As fancy techies like to say: "HTTP is a stateless protocol". Every click is like no click ever happened before. So recalling on a subsequent page, selections and stuff you submitted many clicks ago, is not part of the protocol. Going beyond it, making the visitor experience more convenient, requires website developers to open their boxes of tricks.

We had this request the other day: can you display a map of the locations of users that recently logged onto our system, updating their map positions as they move about? Can the map be centered either on the viewer's location (shown by a different marker) or on the user that last logged in?

As the browser world gravitates towards mobile and its small but high-res screens, we've seen Drupal being at the forefront with the rest of the world with various new solutions like responsive and adaptive designs. Can we equally expect a more mobile-friendly user experience for maps without having to resort to hybrid technologies like Drupal 7 map app example for iPhone & iPad? What's the state of the nation in maps?