Traveller map

Recently I built a small personal photo blog for myself. Since one of my biggest passions is traveling I wanted to share good photos from my trips on the blog. I also wanted to feature a prominent travel map on the blog, which would list all the locations I have visited and link to the blog posts about them. Should be no problem I thought. I just need the right plugin.

Naturally I started my search for a good plugin I could use to create a travel map in the . Like I expected there are plenty of maps and mapping plugins for WordPress already in there. Most of them however use the Google Maps API, something I did not want for my site since the maps are not customizable enough and in my opinion do not look good.

Luckily there is also the Google Geocharts API, which provides a great alternative. It is meant to create map charts and provides enough settings to customize all colors and most other parameters of the resulting maps. There are much fewer WordPress plugins available that use the Geocharts API however and all of the required location markers for the map to be added to a list manually. I planned to have hundreds of places on my map eventually, so that is too time consuming. I needed something that could list all my posts on a map automatically.

The solution was simple of course: I created my own travel map plugin.

Introducing My Simple Travel Map Plugin

Using bits from existing plugins it just took a few days to piece together a basic travel map plugin for WordPress. The result: You can now .

After completion of my own site it I brushed the plugin up a little more, added a basic settings page and then .

That means if you want to create a similar travel map for your own blog you can and follow the instructions below. But first a quick look at what the plugin can actually do:

The Features

• Create a travel map with a nice design, using the free Google Geocharts API.
• A marker can be placed on the map for each of your posts or pages. A custom field is used to set the location of the post on the map.
• Each marker on your travel map links to the post when clicking on it.
• Hovering over a marker opens a popup showing the name and thumbnail image of the post.
• You can display your travel map in any post or page through a WordPress shortcode.
• The settings page allows you to quickly modify all colors to make the map blend in with your WordPress theme.