Take a tip and bookmark packed dive through the vast landscape of interactive mapping sofware via tales of mapping seabirds, seals, sharks, trees, bears and more, and learn how far too many housecats almost put this developer off Drupal for life.

Prerequisite
Though the talk will go deep into the world of geoprocessing, databases and a great many software libraries and services, it will be a broad uncodey overview of which tools to use when, what to look out for and the magical things that interactive maps can do in 2024.

Basic knowledge of what JSON and CSV files are, what PHP, Python and JavaScript are, what a database broadly looks like and a basic understanding of Drupal topics such as caching and Views are recommended but not essential.

A love of wildlife and interactive maps is essential!

Outline
At DrupalCon London in 2011, I fell in love with mapping on the web; soonafter opening the pandoras box of Drupal mapping in a globally viral map of cats for London Zoo. It should have put me off Drupal or at least maps in Drupal for a long time but I've kept building maps, Drupal sites and oftentimes both for wildlife conservation organisations across the world. It seems fair to make some new Drupal developers fall in love with interactive mapping this DrupalCon.

The talk will cover:

- How interactive maps work including common features like markers, shapes, zoom levels, clustering, popups and filters
- Which libraries are out there for building maps on the web
- Drupal's own geospatial fields and modules
- When to build maps outside of Drupal and how to embed them seamlessly
- How different types of mapping data can be prepared, hosted and displayed (map tiles, vector shapes, raster files...)
- Which tools can be used to analyse and edit geospatial data
- How to deal with performance issues / too many cats
- Interactivity through drawing, clicking, filtering and hovering
- The massive improvements in mapping on the web over the last decade and what is possible. Less of what is not possible as most things are now possible!

Learning Objectives
Leave wanting to put beautiful, bespoke interactive maps into your Drupal sites with all the resources you need to do so.

Experience level
Intermediate