New Mapping Features…

I’ve been using some of my time recently to add a few new features to my WordPress Mapping Plugin, here’s a quick list of those features…

	Automatically play a slideshow of featured images from geo-located posts and venues. The map pans dynamically to the location of the post for each featured image. Start and pause the slideshow by clicking the play button bottom-left of the map.
	Display an overlay showing the weather across the map! There’s a setting for what temperature scale to use (°C or °F); it’s set to °C on this site. Plus, when you hover over the weather control (top-right of the map) you’ll see there’s a clouds option too – at the right zoom level you may also chose to show a cloud cover layer. Unfortunately it doesn’t work at close-up levels of zoom. I guess Google think that your point-of-view has zoomed below the cloud cover? Click the weather overlay icons to see a forecast…
	There are three types of map provided by the plugin: venue_map, post_map, and GPX. A venue_map shows all geo-located posts and venues, a post_map can be used to show any ad-hoc location, and a GPX map plots all the positions held in a GPX file. On a post_map similar to the weather layer, there’s a option to display a traffic layer. The traffic layer accompanies the directions feature nicely. Get turn-by-turn directions between any markers, point on the map, or your current location (if supported and shared by your browser). The first example map on the WordPress Mapping Plugin page provides an demonstration of turn-by-turn directions.
	Fullscreen mode… Make the map expand to fill the whole of your browser window. This is an especially nice effect when combined with a slideshow and with the browser window filling the whole of your screen! Start fullscreen mode using the icon top-right of the map.
	Search for addresses, landmarks, points-of-interest, etc. using the search field at the top-centre of the map display. Just enter a location name, e.g. “Mt Kosciusko”, hit the Find button and – if the location is found – the map will pan to show it to you.

And finally, here’s an example map with those new features demonstrated:

X