[OSM-talk] Creating custom OSM sites using the Mapnik OSM plugin?

[Nick Whitelegg]

Not sure if talk's the best place for this, rather than dev, but I would 
guess so as it doesn't relate to OSM development itself.

Anyway, some time ago I developed the OSM plugin for Mapnik, but due to 
other things haven't worked on it for a while. However I always thought 
that it would be useful in allowing people to generate OSM tiles on their 
own machine without the need for a PostGIS database. This has a number of 
benefits: firstly, someone who wanted to create their own OSM-based site 
wouldn't need to set up PostGIS, which can be a little tricky, and 
secondly (and I'm finding this is becoming quite a severe problem on my 
own Freemap site) the server resources required would be much less - the 
server could just serve static Mapnik tiles with no need for a database at 
all (though my own site still needs a database for the POIs). Users could 
render on their own machine and then upload. After the initial phase a GUI 
could be added to the application.

Do people think this is a good idea? It's one of several possibilities 
that I'd like to work on, though I'd probably only do so if there's 
sufficient interest and/or I can't resolve the memory issues on my own 
site in other ways.

Nick