MarineMap3ReleaseNotes.wiki

Release notes for the 3.0 version of MarineMap (MM3)

What's new?

MarineMap 3.0 built off a proven tool for marine spatial planning and expands it to a tremendously flexible framework for developing web-based spatial decision tools in any domain.

MM3 represents a major overhaul of the lingcod code base. Based on Chad Burt's inital idea of a MarineMap Content Management System, the code was refactored to support not only MPAs and Arrays but any sort of Features or Feature Collections that the project might require. This allows for multiple types of features (e.g. wind farms, MPAs and fishing grounds), point, line and polygon features, and the ability to organize them into collections in any configuration.

These enhancements were made possible by significant changes to the code base. The lingcod.rest, lingcod.sharing, lingcod.mpa and lingcod.array modules have been removed; that functionality is encapsulated entirely in the new lingcod.features module. The new API means that porting apps from MM2 to MM3 will require some tweaks to your code (see below for details).

MM3, via the lingcod.features module, provides a greatly simplified set of tools for rapidly developing custom MarineMap instances. Virtually all of the feature configuration takes place in the model and form definitions. Simply register the feature and the urls, standard views, rest API, sharing configuration and user interface elements are all configured automatically. This allows you to focus on customizing the behavior of your feature to fit the project requirements rather than messing with lower-level scaffolding code.

Details on Porting MM2 to MM3

Information about upcoming changes, and how those changes may impact project implementations.

• lingcod.common.urls can be imported to handle all built-in django functionality rather than re-implementing urls for each project. Simply include a line like so at the end of a project's urls.py:

  urlpatterns += patterns('', # Include all lingcod app urls. Any urls above will overwrite the common # urls below (r'', include('lingcod.common.urls')), )

• lingcod.common.default_settings now contains a DATABASES setting, matching the new Django 1.2 convention and dropping the now deprecated DATABASE_* settings. Remove all DATABASE_* settings from project implementations, and override defaults like so:

  DATABASES['default']['name'] = 'marinemap_project_db_name'