Membership application form and OSGeo Member Map Service

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi,
moving to the WebCom mailing list.

Jo Walsh wrote:
> dear Arnulf, all,
> On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 12:55:31PM +0200, Arnulf Christl wrote:
>> we wanted to try and get a membership application form running for 
>> FOSS4G so that people can register themselves directly there. Most of 
>> the required software is probably already in place and just needs some 
>> connection. How can we get this done most efficiently?
>> There is a create-your-account form in the Drupal site at:
>> http://community.osgeo.org/
>> which I suppose should be the main entry point.
> 
> This is what I would prefer. It's very easy to add custom fields to
> the user profiles in drupal. I have yet to investigate how easy it
> will be to customise the UI to step people through more easily.
> I keep promising Tyler that building this will be a 'cakewalk'.
> I want to spend time on this soon this week; online is a bit difficult
> for me right now as i'm at a workshop in Romania, busy 9-5 and net
> availability is pretty bad. 
>  
>> The old form at:
>> https://www.osgeo.org/servlets/Join
>> is still active but I wonder whether we want people to use this to sign up.
> 
> I definitely don't think so. I think it will be straightforward to
> build a nicer, simple membership application in drupal; and then we
> can start 'seeding' a new presence.
> 
> The one thing that concerns me is the LDAP backend. It has been up and
> down recently and HoBu is on a honeymoon trip and not available to
> support it. So far we have had drupal authenticating against LDAP but
> not creating accounts there - this is something it will need to do in
> the future. 
> 
> I think it will be a 20 line perl script to migrate membership details
> and preferences over to LDAP when we have it supported and stable, and
> so i would like to not worry about this - although i know Frank has
> user data migration concerns - as we have to migrate over from the old
> website in a similar way - we're just going to have this problem
> anyway.
>  
>> Then there is the "All members" page in the Wiki but it seems like this 
>> is more of a Who is Who list of activists and normal folk seems to not 
>> use it:
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/All_Members
>> It would be possible to link the coordinates there into a map service 
>> directly.
> 
> http://community.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/member_csv.cgi is my last attempt
> at this. it talks to the drupal database directly and hauls out member
> name, lat long and link to profile. I wrote this intending it for use
> with OpenLayers. Happy to tweak or customise etc for mapbender
> compliance, turn into GeoRSS etc - it's yet another 20 line perl
> script. 

Where should we install Mapbender? On the Drupal server or a telascience 
machine? If we have it on the Drupal Box the URL would read 
community.osgeo.org which sounds like a good URL for the OSGeo 
community. :-)

> Sorry that I can't do much more this week; I will look in when I can;
> I have a local mirror of the community.osgeo.org site but i'm not
> going to be able to look at it until tomorrow - i need to review some
> papers for ISWC that i forgot about :/ 
>  
>> Dominik Helle can help with integrating things. He is into PHP and HTML 
>> and he can set up a MapServer map file and get a Mapbender show member 
>> positions on a map. He is free to do whatever is necessary this week to 
>> get any of this to run. If you have anything where you can make good use 
>> of him - please let him know directly. Ideally we can have a map up and 
>> running for FOSS4G.
> 
> Dominik, we should give you an admin account on the community.osgeo
> site so that you have the right to embed php in nodes, etc. Please
> register an account there, let Tyler and i know the username and the
> first one to be awake at appropriate time will enable you.
> 
> K, i really should get back to the workshop. Arnulf, thanks for
> marshalling all this. AFAIK fred warnock is working on new design, it
> would be good to run the user profile layout / interaction by him as
> well.
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> jo

Hey Jo,
this was all I needed from you. Thanks and back to work.
:-)

Astrid,
this is not the SAC account that you, Ben and Lars eventually need. We 
must wait for SAC do do this. Hobu is not available currently so thats 
stalled.

Dominik,
we should start build the MAP-file and build a GUI with OSGeo logo etc. 
kook for some nice WMS backgrounds all the same. Migration to 
telascience or community.osgeo.org will be easy, just need to exchange 
the OnlineResource in the OGC services. Until we get it to run at 
telascience or OSUOSL we use http://wms1.ccgis.de/cgi-bin/mapserv.

Regards, Arnulf.