Since our presentation on Geo at DrupalCon DC there’s been a lot of interest in the future of the project.  Almost every day we get a request from someone asking how they can help and what our goals are. Mike Anello has gotten the ball rolling with some much-needed documentation, and others have written CCK helper modules such as Geo GUI and GMAP Support.  It's all so exciting!

The biggest hurdle for Geo right now is making sure Allie has time to work on it.  So far, Geo has been a labor of love, and all of this year's development and followup has been done during limited free time.  In recent weeks several developers have told us they have clients who could get a lot of benefit from our Geo solutions, and they've offered help with programming. We certainly appreciate these offers, but don't know how to find the additional volunteer time to provide support and direction to keep developers on the right track.

Geo lacks a lot of polish and some important features, but we've built the foundation with an eye towards the future and could use some help to finish what we've started.

Here is a list of features we’d like to be able to add to Geo between now and DrupalCon Paris.  The cost of building most of these features ranges from about $5,000 to $10,000.  If you would find any of these features useful for your project, and would like to contribute to the sustainability of Geo, we’d love to hear from you!

Enhanced Views support for Geo Data and Geo Field modules

This will make it easier to do things like searching within a shape, searching and ordering by distance, etc. The views functionality exists, but is not particularly configurable right now.

Extended Views support for Geo Data module

Imagine downloading a shape file containing crime statistics, and then building a view that matches all of your visitors to affected areas. This would provide direct Views support to Geo Data tables, which would allow you to build Geospatial searches and displays based on publicly-available data, user-submitted data, or both.

Enhanced support for SVG and KML output

Geo already has support for SVG and KML outputs, but they need a lot of polish.  This would include the ability to add color definitions to data vectors and exporting other views data, such as images.  For example, you could ouput your user-submitted images to a KML file, and have those images appear as popups on your map.

PNG output of Views results and field formatters

This sounds needless with the existence of 3rd party apps and map servers, but will create a much lower barrier of entry for geospatial applications. Imagine a U.S. map with each state colored according to VotingAPI results. Generating a PNG based on available shape data and Views data facilitates powerful applications such as this without the need for a map server.

Improved UI and admin tools for the Geo Data module

This would allow you to import freely-available shape data from any source and cross-reference it with your Drupal content. Because there are no requirements for 3rd party tools, this is one of Geo’s most exciting features! But because it’s not exactly clear what it does, it's easily overlooked.

Additional handlers for the Geocode module

This would include items such as support for the GeoNames API and Geo IP, as well as others.  The Geocode module is a powerful way to convert user-submitted data, such as names, addresses, track files - and even images - to geospatial data.  We'd like to make it more useful and transparent for users to add geospatial data by adding more handlers!