uMap 2 and beyond 🚀

Posted by David Larlet on 2/23/2024

A major version of uMap has been released last week.

This release is inauguring a new era in versioning uMap: in the future, we’ll take care of better documenting breaking changes, so expect more major releases from now on. More details on how we version.

A comprehensive changelog for that version is available in our technical documentation. Most of the changes for a major version are indeed technical, we are taking care of people deploying and maintaining instances with that approach. User-facing features are deployed continuously with our minor versions. We think that scheme is more valuable for the community.

It doesn’t mean you will not see improvements with that release though. Most notably, you’ll face:

A revamped dashboard with multiple options for your maps (including a bulk download / backup)

A hard work by @davidbgk and @Aurelie-Jallut!

revamped dashboard

Experimental drag and drop of file on the map container

Experimental drag and drop of file on the map container

Add minimal CSV export

This sounds like this export should have existed before, but until now we did not decide what to do with complex geometries, and now we did: for now it just add the center. Let’s use it and see if we need something more complex.

Highlight selected feature, finally!

A contribution of @jschleic, with the help of @Aurelie-Jallut!

Full map download endpoint

You can now backup your map programmatically! The URL should look like https://yourumapdoma.in/map/{yourid}/download/

Refactor icon image selector

Changing an icon image in uMap

Very minimal optimistic conflicts resolution mechanism

Thanks to @almet for this, and to @Biondilbiondo for the initial idea and implementation

See also the work in progress (🚧 meaning not yet in production) by @almet to make live collaborative editing a thing in uMap.

New tilelayer switcher (thanks to Leaflet.IconLayers)

A demo of background switch for a map

Add counter in datalayer headline

A screenshot of datalayers with a counter on the right side

A screenshot of latitude and longitude search in uMap

Add a popup template to showcase OpenStreetMap data

The idea is to easily show the most common tags in OSM (name, email, address…). It’s very basic for now, so let’s make it better together!

Showcasing a popup for a bakery from OSM data

Refactor Share & Download UI for better usability

Thanks to @jschleic for this contribution!

A screenshot of the share panel of uMap

And even more

  • an attention to accessibility and contrasts (more to come!)
  • the ability to use oEmbed

Thank you note

Since May 2023, uMap has received support from 2 French government agencies: Agence Nationale de la Cohésion des Territoires and Accélérateur d’initiatives citoyennes. Also, a NGI Grant from the NLNet foundation is in progress to work on the collaborative editing feature. A dedicated instance has been up for a couple month already useful to close to a hundred public agents. This has allowed to finance a team of 7 to work part-time on the project. We’ve recently received confirmation that the funding would be continued in 2024 so keep expecting a lot of activity on the project!

The team is still dedicated to make uMap more stable, accessible and we welcome newcomers so do not hesitate to:

Also don’t miss out on the revamped developer docs website and our the brand new official uMap Project website.

If you appreciate our work and want to support the team behind it please consider donating on:

The uMap team