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When I started writing a travel blog almost half a year ago, I had a specific vision of how it would look. I wanted a big world map, onto which I would drop little pins. Each pin would be a single blog post, and clicking that pin would allow you to read the post in one of those little Google Maps speech bubble thingies.
There is a popular WordPress plugin called WP Geo that allows you to record the latitude and longitude of each post. WP Geo stores the necessary information in the database and has an excellent admin interface. Unfortunately the maps it provides are quite the wrong way round for my idea: WP Geo puts a little map onto your post, I wanted to put my little posts onto a big map!
So I wrote a WordPress plugin to extend WP Geo and add a big sexy map. In order to use it, you need WP Geo installed. To see it in action, check out my own travel map. The plugin is called:
WP Geo Big Map
(Damn, I should have called it WP Geo Big Sexy Map, but it’s too late to change it now)
After installing WP Geo and this plugin, create a new page with nothing except the shortcode [big_map]. This magic shortcode replaces the whole page with a huge map, and all your posts will show up as pins on the map.
The shortcode has a number of customisation options which are detailed on the plugin page on wordpress.org.
Some screenshots:
Posts appear as pins on a big map
Mousing over a pin brings up a summary of the post. The default badge shows the featured image and post excerpt, but you can customise this through your theme
If you make multiple posts in one location, they appear as a pop-up menu on one pin
You can read posts in a pop-up iframe without leaving the map
Installation
NOTE: WP Geo Big Map is tuned to work with the Twenty Ten theme that is the default for WordPress 3.x. If you’re using a different theme that is not based on Twenty Ten, consult the plugin’s readme.txt for instructions.
The easiest way to install the plugin is through the WordPress dashboard. Log in to your site, go to “Plugins > Add New”, search for “big map” and install it.
If you want to see the source code, or install the plugin manually, you can download it from my mercurial repository:
Feedback
Any feedback is welcome, as always. I can be reached at bernie@berniecode.com.
I see you have done quite a lot of work on this plugin! Wow. Congrats and thanks for all your efforts. At the moment I can’t upgrade because when I do I’m receiving a message that I can’t run two instances of the big map on a single page. However I am only attempting to run a single instance. Any thoughts? I reverted to the previous version for now.
Updated to latest version and works great now! TY!
Hi Bernie
ShareThis has a hovering share button to add to any page. It requires you to add a piece of java code to the head of the html and a piece to the body of the html. Have tried to add it to the html file in the plugin but that didn’t work. Was wondering if and how I could add this button to the plugin.