Hey,

After discussing with Ævar, we agreed that using the Maps extension [0] instead of SlippyMap to display OSM maps with OL is probably a good idea, assuming this is doable of course, which I think it is.

I am able and willing to put quite some time into making the needed changes to Maps. Before I can really start though, it would be helpful if I had the most up to date code of SlippyMap, since a lot of it's current code can be re-used. Is this the one committed to the SVN trunk? (I've downloaded that code, but it's missing at least one file and giving other errors as well.) It would also be nice if the people who are working on this end of the mapping effort give me a poke, so efforts can be coordinated, and no one goes off to create duplicate or redundant functionality.
 
If anyone has objections to using Maps instead of SlippyMap, please voice them, so we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Maps.

These are as I see it the most important functionality to-do's:
* Migrate code from SlippyMap to Maps, mainly the static map handling
* Add the ability to display maps without any markers on them. Currently maps has several parser functions, like display_point, which will display an error when you don't provide any coordinates instead of displaying an empty map. (Should be easy to do though.)
* Optimize the code. Currenly Maps supports OpenLayers as mapping service, and allows you to display maps from a variety of mapping services. On top of that, the OL JS is far from optimal. Therefore I think it's best to simply add a new service to Maps (this is done via a hook-like system build in Maps), and create optimized handling for only OL+ OSM there, based on current SlippyMap JS.
* Optionally (probably not required in the first version) add image-as-layer capabilities, allowing users to zoom and pan around high resolution images.

Anything mission critical I'm missing there?

[0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Maps

Cheers

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Jeroen De Dauw
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