Maper

Puts you in your place.

Maper draws every map at its best zoom, plus the surrounding area. The site's own places become real, focusable pointers on a static map drawn on the server, and one control steps out from the best zoom to show what surrounds them. There is no pan and no drag. A pointer opens its place card, docked at the map's foot, so the card never hides the place it describes.

Why another map module

A slippy map lets every reader roam, and every move asks a tile server for more. Maper knows in advance what each map shows, so it knows which tiles it needs, and they are few.

• No API key, no per-load billing, no third party drawing your maps. Maps are drawn on the server from vector tiles the site holds.
• Each tile is fetched once. Tiles are kept in the private file system, never served to a browser, and shared by every map that covers them.
• Restyling fetches nothing. A map style is a palette over the same held tiles: three ship (light, dark, pearl), and changing one redraws every map from what is on disk.
• Framed on the places, not on a bounding box. A map is a fixed grid of 2×2 to 4×4 tiles, centred on the median of its places, at the closest zoom that holds them all. A stage costs at most 16 tiles, and only when a reader asks for it.
• Polite by construction. Fetching is off until a site sets a contact (sent in the User-Agent) and switches it on. Budgets per job and per day, a pause between requests, back-off on 429/503, flood control per reader, HTTPS to one host only. A job over budget is refused whole, never truncated.

Features

• Map types: config entities naming a grid (2 to 4 tiles each way), whether readers get the zoom slider, how far they may step out, and a style.
• Map styles: palettes, what is drawn from which zoom, label rules per tile layer (leave a repeated word out of district names, prefer names in the site's language).
• Three ways to place a map: the Maper map block (this page's node, or the nodes it references), the Maper locator field formatter for a point field, and the Maper map Views style, where every row is a pointer.
• Place cards with a fixed, familiar anatomy (picture, name, kind, state, fact, actions), each slot fed by a field. Field and entity access are respected for every reader.
• "Open with" buttons on one-place maps: Waze, Google Maps, Uber.
• Headless. The stable surface is data: the map as a JSON payload (schema 1), and an endpoint that redraws it at another zoom for issued maps only. The Vue skin that draws it is replaceable the Drupal way (libraries-override, a copied template), and a reference consumer in plain JavaScript shows a front end doing it without Drupal.
• Accessible: pointers are buttons with a 44 px touch target, Escape closes the card, and the map is a named figure.
• A server-drawn fallback: without JavaScript, the map and its pointers are still there.

Tile providers (submodules)

• Maper: OpenFreeMap: OpenMapTiles vector tiles from OpenFreeMap, fetched into the cache. Heavy users can run their own OpenFreeMap instance and point the module at it.
• Maper: Protomaps: tiles read in place from a PMTiles extract you place in private://maper/archives/. Nothing is fetched at all.

Each map carries its provider's credit, worded and linked as the provider asks, and a link to support it.

Experimental: Maper: Nominatim

Places nodes that have no coordinates, and checks the ones that do, against a Nominatim instance, by fixed rules, writing only empty fields and only after a dry run. It ships switched off, with no instance set. The public instance is asked only after the site acknowledges its usage policy. It asks one request at a time, at most one a second, and four a minute when asking recurs. Every answer is kept, and only drush asks anything. It is outside the 1.0 stability promise.

Requirements

• Drupal 11.2 or later, PHP 8.3 (64-bit) with zlib.
• A private file system path.
• Vue 3.5.43, served by the site from /libraries/vue (composer require npm-asset/vue:3.5.43 through asset-packagist). Until it is there, the skin loads that same release from jsDelivr, checked against its hash, and the status report says so. The server-drawn map needs no Vue.

Status

1.0.0-alpha1. Alphas carry no upgrade path: uninstall and reinstall between them. Held tiles are kept across reinstalls, so nothing is fetched twice. From beta1, every change comes with an update.

Credits

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Vector tiles from OpenFreeMap (OpenMapTiles schema) or Protomaps. Built and run in production on Oído en Vivo.