Generating a map of people

The xplanet utility can be used together with the Midgard phonebook for generating maps where people's locations are shown on a world map.

To do this, you first need to make the datamanager schema in your person editor able to input coordinates. This is easily done by adding two new fields:

"latitude" => array (
    "description" => "Latitude (decimal format)",
    "datatype"    => "text",
    "location"    => "parameter",
    "start_fieldgroup" => Array ( 
        "title" => "Location"
    ),
),
"longitude" => array (
    "description" => "Longitude (decimal format)",
    "datatype"    => "text",
    "location"    => "parameter",
    "end_fieldgroup" => "",
),

When this has been done you need to create a PHP script that will read the data from your database, and store it into an xplanet marker file. In this example, I have saved this script to a regular Midgard page :

<?php
$coord_file_name = '/tmp/my_team_coords.txt';
$my_group = mgd_get_object_by_guid("68f8b606a9a64505d722b41899e5689f");

if (is_writable($coord_file_name)) 
{
    $coord_file = fopen($coord_file_name, 'w');

    // Cycle through the developers
    if($my_group)
    {
        $members = mgd_list_members($my_group->id);
        if($members)
        {
            while($members->fetch())
            {
                $member = mgd_get_person($members->uid);
                $latitude = $member->parameter('midcom.helper.datamanager', 'data_latitude');
                $longitude = $member->parameter('midcom.helper.datamanager', 'data_longitude');

                if ($latitude
                    && $longitude)
                {
                    // Write the line
                    $member_line = "{$latitude} {$longitude} \"{$member->username}\" # {$member->firstname} {$member->lastname}\n";
                    fwrite($coord_file, $member_line);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    fclose($coord_file);
}
else
{
    die("Coordinate file {$coord_file_name} is not writable");
}

// Then make the maps
exec("xplanet --output /tmp/our_team.jpg --geometry 640x320 -num_times 1 -projection rectangular  -body earth -config /home/bergie/my_team.conf");
?>

After this has been done, test that the coordinate file gets populated properly. Lines in it should look something like the following:

60.1591 24.9422 "bergie" # Henri Bergius

Next you need to make the xplanet configuration file /home/bergie/my_team.conf. It should contain at least the following:

marker_file=/tmp/midgard-coords.txt
map=earth.jpg
night_map=earth.jpg

Once this has been done, add your script to cron to ensure that the maps get updated frequently. In this case I have the following file in /etc/cron.daily:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/lynx -dump http://www.example.net/path/to/page/