Is there a plan to include the zoom and pan capabilities within mapframe? At present they only appear in preview mode, which seems a bit pointless. Similarly the really helpful scale bar also vanishes when I publish changes. Are they likely to make it into the final vesion?
Topic on Talk:Map improvements 2018
Hi Robin. Best would be if you could include a URL, so we can have a look at your specific issue.
But in general, I think what you're describing is this: most Wikipedias are configured so that the mapframe map embedded on the page is not dynamic. It's a graphic, which means you can't pan or zoom it, as you say. I think this is done to reduce page load times (or server load?). To get pan and zoom, you click on the map, which pops up the dynamic version. On Wikivoyages, by contrast, the dynamic version is embedded in the page. In theory we could reconfigure your wiki to show dynamic maps, but I don't know what the impact would be, especially if it's one of the larger wikis. Perhaps @Catrope might know?
The missing map scale gauge is something I hadn't noticed before. Thanks for pointing it out. I can clearly see what you mean on these test pages: testwiki is configured for static maps (and shows no scale markers) while test2 wiki is configured for dynamic mapframes (and has the scale). I can't think of a reason why we wouldn't want to display this useful informational item, so I've created a ticket for this bug.
I was about to ask whether zoom and latitude/longitude values could be accessed while in editing preview in en:mapframe, and discovered that it already works on a right click. Great work ... now the interactive mode all makes sense to me. Really useful feature for setting up a map, which probably needs talking up in the documentation. Thanks.
>...discovered that it already works on a right click.
I'd love to document the feature you're referring to but I'm not following. Can you take me through step-by-step? Are you talking about using Visual Editor with maps, perhaps?
No, it is within the normal traditional editing preview. If I have understood phabricator correctly, it is the feature described at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129875 to 'Show current coordinates & zoom in edit preview & VE mode'
The value lies in the fact that you might add a mapframe knowing just the coordinates of a feature. However, that simply plonks the map centred on that feature. You can then preview the map, and then adjust the zoom and position to show the segment of map that best displays what is wanted, and then right click in the centre of the frame and copy the coordinate details, ready to paste back into the template.
Yes, the ability to refine map placement interactively is a really nice feature of the Visual Editor maps interface. Thanks for mentioning that. I'm pinging @CKoerner (WMF) to bring this idea to his attention, since he is writing the VE section of the maps help.
There are complaints on bgwiki that these static maps (i.e. you have to click to be able to zoom in/out) are inconvenient. We previously had a system with static switchable maps of different scale—settlement, region, country—that was apparently intuitive enough as the maps were arranged as clickable tabs (example). So there are now questions whether we should go back to that system. Indeed, it isn't too obvious that you can actually click on the new maps. Considering that bgwiki is not too large, is it possible to have the dynamic maps embedded as on Wikivoyages? @JMatazzoni (WMF), @Roan Kattouw (WMF)?
Sure, that'd be fine. We only really need static maps on large wikis, but as a first step we just enabled them on all Wikipedias. I'll make the bgwiki maps dynamic, and then I'll see if I can figure out a way to find out which wikis are large and small for this purpose that's more scientific than looking at who complains on this talk page :)
Wow, that's great, thank you so much, Roan! My colleagues will surely be very happy :)
This is done now. However existing maps won't update immediately, they'll only change from static to dynamic when the page is edited or purged. For testing, I purged the Кожани article, so you can see what the new dynamic maps look like there.
Perfect! The maps are much more convenient and useful now. Many thanks for the quick reaction again, Roan!