[OSM-talk] Potlatch 2 Public Alpha

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

(Deep breath)

I'm delighted to unveil a test version of Potlatch 2, the all-new, 
completely rewritten version of OpenStreetMap's online editor.

You can play with it at http://www.geowiki.com/ . It talks to the main 
OSM server and you can make real edits with it.

This is a public alpha. This means it's an early version of the software 
and there are lots of bugs in it. Performance leaves a whole lot to be 
desired. It _will_ eat your memory, and it may freeze up or crash. 
Presets for ways don't generally have icons - either that or they're a 
bit sketchy. There's no documentation.

It's an experimental release for people who already have experience 
using Potlatch and know what they're doing. It's not for newbies - yet!

But here's some of the cool stuff it does:
- super friendly tagging system
- WYSIWYG map display with names on roads and the like
- powerful editing tools like 'make right-angled', 'create parallel 
line' and so on
- vector backgrounds so you can manually bring in .osm files, shapefiles 
and so on
- dedicated turn restriction and route editors
- really good relations support

It's not just a general-purpose editor: you can use it to create your 
own editor with your favourite presets, icons, backgrounds and 
rendering. Everything is in easily configurable files, and it talks 
OAuth so people can log into the OSM server securely from outside. We 
hope that people will use it to build cycle-specific editors, public 
transport editors, "fix unnamed roads" editors... all of that. It's a 
foundation for people to do more cool stuff with OSM.

Potlatch 2 has only been possible thanks to the contributions, in 
particular, of Dave Stubbs and Andy Allan. Dave has built a terrific 
architecture for the program in general, way beyond anything I could 
ever think up, and in particular for the tagging system. Andy has given 
it a relation editor so much more powerful than P1 ever had, niggled 
away at a zillion little bugs, and given the project the impetus it 
needed. Lots of other people have helped as well: Twain47 (Mr Nominatim) 
contributed some excellent icons, Matt wrote the superb quadrilateralise 
function, Shaun added Big Concrete Blocks et al to the presets, and 
loads of others have helped. I'm delighted to only be one of the cast 
and think it augurs really well for the future.

So what now?

You _will_ find a really obvious bug about five seconds into using it. I 
guarantee it. Please use the wiki pages to report it: 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potlatch_2 . There's three pages for 
filing bugs so we can prioritise which to fix first.

It's all open source (obviously) in a proper language (ActionScript 3) 
with a real framework (Flex) and an open source compiler (Flex Open 
Source SDK). If you would like to get involved with coding it: \o/, woo 
and yay.

If you'd like just to improve the presets and the stylesheets, \o/ woo 
and yay too - you don't need to program for that. We have a mailing 
list, potlatch-dev 
(http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/potlatch-dev) to talk about 
development of whatever stripe. And the stylesheet language, MapCSS, is 
racing on - but more of that anon.

Hope you enjoy it. Look forward to the feedback.

cheers
Richard