CanalPlan Blogs

Well the CPRS tag has been coded. At the moment it only works on a post that is published as part of a blogged route. When the tag is inserted into a page it looks up the information for that day and inserts the start and end places for the day as CanalPlan AC gazetteer links.

It also puts the distance and the locks worked. The format of the distance (decimal miles, miles and furlongs, miles and yards etc.) is controlled by the Default Distance Format option on the General Options tag on the CanalPlan Options menu.

The tag can be seen on the Blogged Routes for Mintball where it automatically inserts the “From Lords Bridge No 64 to Hunting Bridge No 7 a distance of 24 miles, 72 yards and 6 locks” text at the top of the page.

The General options tag will be growing some more general options which are primarily concerned with the presentation and advanced features (that I’m working on).

So the question is – what to do next. The CPRM tag (which embeds a map into the blog showing the days’ route) seems the most sensible thing to do as most of the code already exists (although I have to do some sneaky stuff to handle multiple maps on a single page) and as Nick is still coding away on the core of V9 of CanalPlan AC it seems that the route importing code will come last.

After the basic CPRM tag is done I’ll add a couple of minor enhancements to it and the CPRS tag, and then I’ll work on the route management stuff as I’m pretty confident that the data structures I’ve built (manually at the moment) are working well.