Cartaro is the web mapping platform that brings the power of the best open source geospatial components into a content management system. This is achieved by integrating the geospatial components in Drupal and the platform can be downloaded as a special Drupal profile. The main geospatial components used in Cartaro are PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers. All those are managed from within the powerful CMS Drupal.
First we will review the general definition of maps and layers as used in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Then, we will show how Cartaro manages these elements in Drupal. To conclude this part we will give a small demo with a map and some layers.
Then we will take Cartaro to a higher level by handling the geometry fields programmatically and by passing their values to the Drupal hook system. We will show how maps and layers are defined in code and how all these pieces fit together to create rendered maps. As a showcase we will visit a web application that makes maps from user input layers.
Cartaro works fine in Drupal 7, thanks to the geOps team and the main project contributors. Efforts to develop Cartaro for Drupal 8 and to port the geospatial components to Drupal 8 have been started. If you are interested in getting a full geospatial CMS in Drupal 8, then have a look at www.drupal.org/project/cartaro.