A MapBox Theme Design Walk Through
Everything you need to know to render and edit styles yourself
I recently added new documentation explaining how to use stylesheets with MapBox, our open source toolset to create custom maps in the cloud, by walking through how we created the DC Nightvision tiles. If you're interested in creating your own custom maps, this how to will help you get started.
I've also packaged up and released everything needed to render and edit the style yourself. The stylesheet was already available on GitHub, but now all the shapefiles - as well as fonts and bitmaps - are available to download in a single zip file. I hope that by having examples like this available we can make the learning process easier and encourage more people to create their own custom MapBox maps.
You can read the walkthrough on how to use stylesheets with Mapbox and download all the data on MapBox.com.
Where do you get the project data?
very cool.
One question: where do you get the projection data you use inside the DOCTYPE ENTITY tags?
for instance:
<!ENTITY srsWGS84 "+proj=longlat +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +no_defs">Where do you get the project data?
An easy way to get the projection of a shapefile is to import it into QuantumGIS and open up the Layer Properties window (Layer > Properties...). You will find the projection under the "General" tab.
Alternatively, command line tools like ogrinfo in the GDAL library can be helpful for finding out details like this.
AJ
Thanks AJ. Quickly: the
Thanks AJ.
Quickly: the question I seem to have about MapBox all the time, is about who its for. Is MapBox for non-developers? For people to use as a replacement for GoogleMaps? Or is it for cartographic sites, or at least sites with a GIS person on side?
The implementation of nice maps with nice tiles on Managing News is awesome, but I’m still struggling with if/how ‘ordinary’ people use the product. So, I guess the question I have is: I make Drupal sites. I know a lot of Drupal, a little PHP, and no GIS/Mapping. Can I use these mapbox products on my website?
Thanks!
MapBox is very targeted
MapBox is very targeted towards developers. The map design and TileMill work is still very technical.
But, for people that use google maps, we have documented how to ad custom tiles to google maps and are working to make it easier to add custom layers to general drupal sites that are using the gmap and OpenLayers modules.
Bonnie
Thank you!
A big “thanks” for sharing knowledge and for your helpful blog! And a big “respect” to the projects I saw at developmentseed so far!