Mapping Maps in the Wild – a complex collaborative project

Maps in the Wild Mappery has been my side project for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years Arnaud Ferrand has been my co-editor and the tech brain that keeps the site running. Mappery is a large WordPress site with 2,500 posts and 3,500 images of Maps in the Wild (pictures of maps in the street, on clothes, furniture, alcohol etc). For several years we had a map plugin that allowed us to enter a coordinate pair for a post and to render a clustered map with pins representing each post, click on a pin and the post image and some text appears in the popup with a link to the post. It worked ok but the map used the Google Maps API which had cost implications and we also had several complications with the map not rendering and the plugin wasn’t being maintained. Eventually we decided to disable the plugin and remove the map from our site. We planned to build a new map but time flew past and we didn’t get round to it. When we were ready to get back to the map, we discovered that deleting the…