Things to do
Serious data construction
- Complete distance editing
- Allow waterways to be split into sections (the Rhône should have its canal sections the way the Trent does)
PRIORITY FIXES
- Allow the map to be expanded without going through preferences
- Add a route from "quick search" to waterways gazetteer
- Purge aliases that now exist in their own right (eg Whetstone Lane Bridge No 99)
simple improvements to make sooner rather than later
- Add "editable item" with an explanation somewhere http://wikiindex.org/Welcome
- Make cgi-bin/index.cgi redirect when called with no parameters, so if you go straight there you don't get a very ugly page
- Look at Google maps and see what they've added in the few last years or so
- Make maps work using mapstraction (thanks for RF for tipping me off about this)
- Default gazetteer layout for search engines should be photos first, then prox (why??)
- Fiddle with "totals" in route tables (consider a separate row with colspan)
- Improve the description of canals (for example, give mainline type and length for S&W and T&M)
placefinder stuff
- Match_Boatyards etc
- Make "show all results" work in unknown place
- "Bonehill Bridge" is a very poor match when there is "Bonehill Road Bridge" (bad in live version - make this one better)
Chunks of coding
- Because of the way excluded waterways are not local to each user you need a way to "open" a waterway if any are restored in future. This is a little admin function to remove entries from all users options (or indeed add them if waterways are closed - as has happened to the Hulme Lock Branch, or to cope with a major year+ breach)
- Replace output tables and lists with something more like gazetteer - can chose which bits you get (distances (with three versions: table,list,detailed list), total, breakdown, overnight stops)
- Route planning is in minutes - move to seconds internal to interpreter (rounding errors get significant as the data resolution gets finer)
- Revisit the start/end at locks (for example, in flights add the last lock to the leg that takes you there, not the next)
- Look at creating a Google mapplet to show canalplan places
- Steve told me about new way to add searchers for later browsers
Tidying up and consistency
- Standardise titles in all templates
- Add text files (wiki based) and link from "introduction" on main page and add a menu
- That attributed to Mark Twain quote displays badly in homepage
Overnight and route list/table improvements
- Clock warnings in overnights
- Sunrise/sunset in overnights
- Warnings in route tables and lists
- Look at extra place data that might have got lost (do you have road names and numbers anymore?). Lee Bridge is the A457 and is Dudley Road, for example
- Allow users to chose their favourite date format
- New quote and event pages (dynamic? Recreated on update?)
- Move places out of flights and tidal waters in itineraries (all overnights?), and warn about it
Internationalisation
- There is some text (preference strings, duration settings, compass points) inside the program (C and script). This needs to be abstracted.
- Decimal points
- The '%X' distance format that produces nice things like supressing leading miles, putting "a few yards" for very close etc, is used in the gazetteer when in m &f. It could be argued that only english speakers use m&f, but in an ideal world these would be parameters (it's not that difficult to do - read the strings from config.xml and output the appropriate ones).
- Extend the %S format (allows "foot/feet") to distances as well as dimensions
