Control panel

GeoContent is fully configurable from the Joomla! control panel.

After a successfull Installation procedure you will find a new menu item for GeoContent under Components‣GeoContent menu.

Control panel: the GeoContent menu item

GeoContent Layers management

GeoContent Layers are groups of geographic features (GeoContent Items) sharing the same style (colors, line width etc.).

Control panel: the GeoContent Layers list view

Tip

Each GeoContent Layer can be exported as KML data, default configuration provides a small globe icon near the layer’s name in the Table of Contents, users can click on the icon to download the KML file.

GeoContent Layers Visibility

Layers visiblity can be controlled in several ways:

• users can individually switch on and off every layer from the Table of Contents (if Table of Contents is enabled in the map configuration),
• administrators can can publish or unpublish GeoContent Layers from the control panel,
• a few configuration parameters allows administrators to automatically switch on selected layers when the map is loaded or to hide certain layers from the Table of Contents

GeoContent Layers Edit

Administrators can add a new GeoContent Layer choosing Components‣GeoContent‣New menu.

GeoContent Layers insert/edit dialog.

Tip

Click on the rainbow icon to configure the colors and transparency, format is hexadecimal RRGGBBAA (R=Red, G=Green, B=Blue, A=Alpha transparency).

Note

Google Maps (and GGeoXML in the Google Maps API) - always renders icons as 32x32 pixels - no exceptions, the KML can’t change that.

This means that the icons size you set in layer configuration form has only effect when the layer is shown through Google Earth, the icon size on the browser’s Google Maps is always stretched to 32x32 pixels. To avoid stretching, you can place your resized icons on a 32x32 pixels transparent background.

GeoContent Items management

GeoContent Items are the individual items of your map, they can be points, lines, polygons or all this geometric types together.

GeoContent Items are very flexible objects: they can be linked to an existing Joomla! article or to an arbitrary URL, they can have a custom title (defaults to Joomla! article if any) and a custom text. Both the title and the text will be shown in the balloon text when the user click on the map on the GeoContent Item‘s location.

Control panel: the GeoContent Items list view

GeoContent Items Edit

Administrators can add a new GeoContent Item choosing Components‣GeoContent menu and by clicking on the icon in the first column of the layer you want to add GeoContent Items to.

Tee GeoContent Items editing dialog window is split into two parts:

1. Item details, where you can define the balloon content and title and the optional link to an existing Joomla! article
2. Geometric informations, where you enter the geographic informations

Note

Since there must be something into the balloon, if the Balloon content field is empty, the Title field value is used as a default.

Item details

Here you define the content of the balloon that is shown when the user click on an item in the map.

You can bind your GeoContent Items to an existing Joomla! article by clicking on Select article button or entering directly the article’s ID in the input field near the button.

When a GeoContent Item is bound to an article, item’s title and URL are read from the article itself when generating the map. You can still override item’s tite and/or URL filling the fields in the dialog.

Another side-effect of article binding is that when Content plugin is installed and enabled and the plugin Parameter automatic_maps is also enabled, the plugin will insert in the article’s page a GeoContent map automatically zoomed and centered to the article’s associated GeoContent Items.

GeoContent Items insert/edit dialog, items details in the dialog window.

See also

GeoContent Items can also be entered/edited from the front-end (the public side of Joomla!). GeoContent must be configured to allow front-end editing (see: Front-end editing).

Geometric informations

Here you enter the POINTs, LINEs and POLYGONs for your GeoContent Items, two input methods are supported:

1. direct draw on the map
2. GPX file import

GeoContent Items insert/edit dialog, geographic informations in the dialog window.

Using the integrated map editor

Click on Open Google Map Editor button to open the map editor.

GeoContent Items the map editor window.

Note

Geographic data are stored internally in WKT format, the data are shown in a text input field but you should never modify them by hand unless you exactly know what you’re doing.

GPX loading

Select a GPX file from your local computer and upload it on the server hittig Save or Apply buttons.

Warning

GPX loading works fine in most situations, but if the file is big it can result in huge geometries in the maps. This can cause speed problems when editing the map through the integrated editor. This problem comes directly from Google’s map API implementation and we (GeoContent‘s developers) can’t do much to solve it.