GMapEZ has supported drawing lines using the Google Maps API for a while now, but I’ve always put off implimenting this since I thought it would be quite a bit of work and involve lots of changes in my XML format. I finally decided to impliment it today and I found a very easy way to assign points to lines.
First an example map so you can see what you can achieve:
The line thickness, color and opacity is configurable on a per-line basis and you can assign any point in your existing data file to a line on the map, to achieve this I extended the XML data using a <linemember> element, here is an example point:
<point> <lat>51.393522</lat> <long>0.527054</long> <type>visit</type> <title>Chatham Historic Dockyard</title> <country>England</country> <href>http://www.chdt.org.uk/</href> <linktext>Home Page</linktext> <linemember>1</linemember> </point>
The points on the line get connected in order that they appear in your data file.
To configure the line created above you can add a [line1] section to your configuration file, simply match up the linemember numbers with the lineX section in your config, a sample:
[line1] color = #00ff00 width = 2 opacity = 0.6
This will draw the line in the image above, I think it’s very simple and it should be 100% backward compatible with your exiting data should you choose not to use this feature.
As always you can get the code at http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz the documentation at http://www.devco.net/pubwiki/GMapsPHP has also been updated to reflect these changes.
