Introduction

GeoContent Plus is a Joomla! component that let you easily embed beautiful Google Maps or OpenLayers Maps into your Joomla! website.

Standard Joomla! articles, can be bound to GeoContent Items - which consist in geographic features such as POINTs, LINEs and POLYGONs - and the resulting maps can be shown in the article page and/or in one or more overview maps.

A single GeoContent Item can be represented by more than one geographic type: so that you can have simultaneously a set of POINTS, some POLYGONS and some LINES for a single Joomla! article.

GeoContent Items on the map are grouped by GeoContent Layers, graphic appearance of GeoContent Items can be fully customized defining styles attributes in the GeoContent Layers configuration panel.

GeoContent Plus was created as a sort of Geographic Index to Joomla! articles, the earliest versions had a tight binding between Joomla! articles and the geometric features that GeoContent Plus was going to show on its maps. Suggestion from the users made GeoContent Plus subsequently evolve to cover more general use cases, it is now possible to create GeoContent Items which are completely unbound from existing Joomla! articles.

The new Access Control List (ACL) features introduced by Joomla! 1.6 are now fully supported by GeoContent Plus allowing a fine grained control over the front-end and back-end user access to the different operations available in the software.

GeoContent Items are also language-aware: they can optionally make use of the same Joomla! language support system recently introduced for Joomla! core articles.

Requirements

GeoContent Plus requirements are the same as Joomla! 1.7.x.

Warning

simplexml PHP extension is required by GeoContent Plus, this extension is a standard extension and is normally installed by default. In a few rare cases, we’ve found this extension was missing, if in doubt, ask to your system administrator or ISP to install this extension.

Key features

What makes this component unique among other mapping tools in the Joomla! galaxy is probably the level of assistance (this is really what people pays for), its ease of use, its configurability and and its Import/Export functions.

Import/Export

Input functions allows you to import tracks from a GPX file or directly draw into a map window within your browser, all your data will also be readily available in KML format.

Place your maps everywhere

With the GeoContent Plus core output you can place your GeoContent Plus maps in one or more pages choosing one of the available Map renderers. Using Plugins you can also place customized Tag maps everywhere in an article or get the map inserted automatically in all articles where a linked GeoContent Item exists.

Styles & more

From the control panel interface you can configure the appearance in details:

for each GeoContent Layer, you can style:

• Line color
• Line width
• Polygon line color
• Polygon fill color
• Polygon line transparency
• Polygon fill transparency
• Point icon
• Point icon size (OpenLayers Maps, Olwidget Maps and KML only: not supported in the embedded Google Maps)

Of course you can configure several aspects of the main map appearance:

• Table of Contents (TOC) type (hidden, list, select)
• TOC position (left, top, right, bottom)
• TOC and main map width (onyl useful for TOC position left and right)
• Which layers should be activated at start (none, all, selected)
• Map dimensions
• KML icon (hide or show)

OpenLayers based maps (OpenLayers Maps and Olwidget Maps) supports more styling attributes:

• Labels for features (you can choose, font, color and transparency)
• Clustering for points (Olwidget Maps only: points which are closer than 20px at the current visualisation scale are grouped)
• Selection style: selected items (when the user clicks on an item) are styled differently

Geocoding

Geocoding module allows the user to enter an address in a form field and get either redirected to a page of your site containing a GeoContent Plus map or get the existing map in the page (if any) centered and zoomed on the address coordinates.

This module is quite flexible and allows some nice tricks.

Map types

GeoContent Plus can produce different kind of maps, allowing a broad range of use cases.

Overview maps

An Overview Map can be used as a geographic index to your Joomla! contents (articles or other Joomla! elements), this kind of map is typically used as a primary or secondary home page to show how website’s contents are positioned on the globe.

Automatic maps

An automatic map is generated by a Joomla! Content plugin which automatically adds a map to an article’s page if the article has an associated GeoContent Item.

Tag maps

Tags maps are the most flexible type of map: they are inserted by a Joomla! Content plugin which replaces the {geocontent} string when found in an article’s body.

Tags maps can be configured in depth to show or not to show the Table of Contents or certain layers.

Map renderers

Available map types can be shown using different Map renderers.

GeoContent Plus renderers have both a different appearance and different configuration options.

Small glossary

Just a few terms used in this manual and their meaning:

• GeoContent Layer: layers are groups of geometric features (GeoContent Item, see below), they also hold all informations concerning the appearance (colors, transparency, line width etc.) of the GeoContent Item
• GeoContent Item: these are the geometric features which share the same balloon text (if any), the same hyperlink (if any) or the same link to a Joomla! article (if any), GeoContent Item can also be ‘’complex’’ in the sense that GeoContent Plus does not pose any limitation on the number or geometric type (POINT, LINE or POLYGON) of the individual geometric entities you place in a GeoContent Item
• Table of Contents: a list of layers with associated controls to switch visualisation on or off and optionally a small globe icon to download layer’s contents in the KML format.
• Front-end: the public side of Joomla!, the Joomla! administration control panel is also known as back-end.