[OpenLayers-Users] feature requests

[Chris Holmes]

Ok, so there's a few things I'd love to see openlayers able to do.  I'm
happy to put these in to trac, but thought I'd raise them on the list
for discussion first.  Feel free to break up in to their own threads.


WFS-T is first on my list.  Even if it was just for points, it would be
very cool, and indeed that would handle a lot of simple uses.  WFS-T
would just be a persistent store for users marking up a map.  It'd be
nice to handle insert (new marker), delete (remove marker) and update
(change a value).  On the update stuff Raj recently put together a nice
little ajax thing to actually update in the pop-up box.  This could
easily be done in openlayers too, something like if you double click on
one of the fields in the pop-up then it goes from text to an editable
field, maybe with an 'update' button by it or some such.

Further WFS-T features would be cool, ability to edit a line or polygon,
but would probably require SVG/microsoft's thing to be useful, which is
obviously a non-trivial amount of work.  Of course OSM would probably
like it a lot too.  Indeed it'd be great if OpenLayers could be used to
edit WFS-T and OSM.

Next up is a pretty basic one, that would be super nice to have.  Let
users add their own WMS.  Like instead of having to configure the
script, I could just click a button that says 'add wms', and then I'd
just supply the base url, the typename, and any additional parameters.
I think this would be nice to show the power of WMS, that the openlayers
map you're viewing is not static, but open to your interpretation.
(past this it'd be awesome to add SLD editing, so you could also have
clients style their map as they want, and use SLD post to tell the
server to make the map different, but that's another pretty big project).

The next step past user added WMS is to let the user persist it.
Basically I'd be able to add a few WMS servers, and then hit 'save
configuration' and my browser would let me save the javascript config to
disk, which I can then set up on my own webpage.  I think this could 
have great potential, allowing people to remix their own maps easily 
(esp. if combined with SLD editing so they could actually change the 
cartography as they like, instead of just composing layers).

Beyond that one could do through the web configuration, instead of
having the configuration exported out for use in a new web page, an
'admin' could log in and change the root configuration.  So it'd persist
the new WMSes added.  But this feature probably isn't worth the effort,
since it'd be a bitch to do some admin log-in, and even the admin could
just export it out and save it to the same location.  But there could be
some cool admin operations beyond that, let users configure everything
through the web, not have to know anything about javascript to fully
configure their map.

keep up the great work guys, I'm excited to see what's next.



-- 
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
http://topp.openplans.org

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