Trailforks.com - Mountain biking trail database

www.trailforks.com is a community-powered mountain biking trail database currently focused on BC Canada. The main focus is trail gps data and Google maps/earth views. Trailforks has a high focus on promoting local riding associations and groups and aims to be a tool for them to use.

Background

Back in 2009 I created a simple Facebook app called "Ride Log" for tracking days ridden in the season. From that I got the idea of creating a database of trails and looked around and didn't find an existing website that I thought did a good job specific for mountain biking, especial in my region. I started working on the site in September 2011 in my spare time and finally launched it in Feb 2012.

I chose to build the site using Drupal mainly because the power of "Views". I had also been developing several other sites with Drupal in the past 2 years so I have become very familiarly with it. I chose Drupal 7 which seems pretty mature now with community module support. The last site I made in early 2011 I stuck with D6 because D7 still didn't have many modules I wanted to use, but there now is pretty much everything I need for D7.

Building the site

Drupal views is so powerful and easy to create so much of a website, especially lists of data. I love the power of views exposed filters, its something that I use a lot, example: http://www.trailforks.com/trails
I used a lot of other community modules to add features to the site. The core gps trail feature was built using a combination of my own custom code and hacking apart 2 existing Drupal6 modules "kml" & "trackfield".

GPS data is extracted from uploaded GPX or KML files and stored in the database as raw data that can then be used to derive stats from, create height graphs and create tracks for KML output.

The KML module is super useful for using the power of views to generate google kml files. I modified the module to add additional features like tracks, coloured tracks, different icons and styles and polygon shapes. On some pages I use gmap for simple pushpin maps, but most of the maps i create in the theme template files using google maps api and the kml files generated by views. Example: http://www.trailforks.com/riding_areas/mount-fromme

I have several of my own custom modules for custom theming, modifications to forms, usability mods, menus and such. One thing I always like to do with a custom module is override taxonomy term output to use views.

function central_term_page($tid) {
  $vocabulary = taxonomy_vocabulary_load($tid->vid);
  switch($vocabulary->machine_name) {
    case 'location':
      return custom_taxonomy_page($tid);
    case 'directory_type':
      return views_embed_view('directory', 'page_4', $tid->tid);
    case 'product_category':
      return views_embed_view('products', 'page_1', $tid->tid);
    case 'event_types':
      return views_embed_view('events', 'page_2', $tid->tid);
    case 'trail_type':
    case 'difficulty':
    case 'recommended_bike_type':
    case 'ttf':
    case 'physical_rating':
      return views_embed_view('trails', 'block_4', $tid->tid);
    default:
      // Returns the default term page provided by taxonomy module.
      module_load_include('inc', 'taxonomy', 'taxonomy.pages');
      return taxonomy_term_page($tid);
  }
}

The "trail reports" feature updates the status field on trails whenever a new trail report is added. Example overview of a regions trail status: http://www.trailforks.com/canada/north-shore/status I utilized association's a lot to minimize the amount of data a user has to input on forms.

The site has a hierarchy of content, locations/regions are taxonomy then a "riding area" node is at the bottom level of the taxonomy. Trails are then associated with a riding area. Photos, videos, trail reports and so on are then associated with a trail. Using this string of associations I can show any of the content at any level of the hierarchy. Riding areas show the total number of trails associated with it separated by trail difficulty, i use the "computed field" module for this. http://www.trailforks.com/riding_areas

db_query("DELETE FROM {field_data_field_count_difficulty} WHERE entity_id=':d'", array(':d' => $entity->nid));
$terms_array = array();
$terms = db_query("SELECT t.tid FROM {field_data_field_riding_area} f LEFT JOIN {taxonomy_index} t ON f.entity_id=t.nid LEFT JOIN {taxonomy_term_data} tt ON t.tid=tt.tid WHERE f.field_riding_area_nid=:d AND f.bundle='trail' AND tt.vid='5' GROUP BY f.entity_id", array(':d' => $entity->nid))->fetchAll();
foreach ($terms as $item) {
	$terms_array[] = $item->tid;
}
$count = array_count_values($terms_array);
ksort($count);

$c = 0;
foreach ($count as $key => $value) {
	switch ($key) {
		case '10': $image = 'double_black.gif'; break;
		case '11': $image = 'black.gif'; break;
		case '12': $image = 'blue.gif'; break;
		case '13': $image = 'green.gif'; break;
                case '93': $image = ''; break;
	}
	if (!empty($image)) $entity_field[$c]['value'] = '<span class="diffcount"><img src="'.url('sites/default/files/'.$image).'" />'.$value.'</span>';
	$c++;
}

For the Google earth maps I had a hardtime centering the camera on the area and having it tilt by default. So riding areas have a field called "polygon" where I input the coordinates of a polygon shape outlining the entire riding area that I create using Google Earth program. Then in my custom module I use a bit of code to find the centre of the polygon and use that point to centre the camera on and tilt from.
Here is my code for finding centre of a polygon, its not perfect, but its approximate enough for this need.

function polyCenter($polygon) {
  $p = array_chunk($polygon,2);
  $n = count($p);
  for($i=0;$i<$n;$i++) {
    $x+=$p[$i][0];
    $y+=$p[$i][1];
  }
  return array($x/$n,$y/$n);
}

I used the "framework" theme as the base for the site and have template override pages for every node type and much more. user profile page screenshot: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/409225_298875186837...

I originally was using megamenu module for the sites main navigation, but I found it very slow and hard to customize. So I opted to not use a module and instead hard coded the menu in the template file and used my own jquery & css. This is not ideal for others to easily manage the menu using the Drupal admin GUI, but its way faster to render and I don't mind having to edit a template file to update the menu. I think this is a practice I will use on other sites that arn't being handed off to a client.

I use the "userpoints" module to give users credit for contributing content and I created a bunch of custom achievements using the achievements module API. The activity module is used to monitor users on the site. I also created a bunch of other views to further monitor site activity, Example the vote log: http://www.trailforks.com/tracker/votes/log

I use the "services" module to create an API for Trailforks. I have used this API to integrate trail reports into my RideLog Facebook app. I also created some standalone embeddable widgets that don't call Drupal bootstrap but instead use the API http://www.trailforks.com/widget

I use the calendar, date & signup modules for events & group rides systems. I want to be able to import ical feeds to auto create events, but the current Drupal7 version of the "Feeds" ical parser is broken.

I run the site on Windows Server 2008 with IIS7, so I use the PHP extension called wincache to help performance. I also use a memcache server and Boost with IIS web.config rules.

Community Modules Used

• achievements
• acl
• activity
• addanother
• addthis
• adsense
• advanced_forum
• auto_nodetitle
• better_exposed_filters
• better_formats
• block_class
• boost
• calendar
• calendar_ical
• colorbox
• computed_field
• ctools
• custom_breadcrumbs
• date
• diff
• entitycache
• exif
• fast_404
• feeds
• filefield_paths
• fivestar
• flag
• gmap
• googleanalytics
• hierarchical_select
• inactive_user
• insert
• location
• mailchimp
• memcache
• metatag
• mollom
• nodereference_count
• nodereference_url
• node_reference
• opengraph_meta
• openx
• page_title
• parser_ical
• pathauto
• performance_hacks
• prepopulate
• privatemsg
• rest_server
• revisioning
• rpx
• rules
• services
• services_oauth
• signup
• subscriptions
• taxonomy_breadcrumb
• taxonomy_menu
• tipsy
• token
• token_tweaks
• uniqueness
• userpoints
• userpoints_rules
• user_dashboard
• user_reference
• video_embed_field
• views
• views_slideshow
• views_slideshow_cycle
• views_tooltip
• votingapi
• votingpoints
• voting_rules
• weather_google
• xcal_format
• xmlrpc_server
• xmlsitemap

Please feel free to post any questions, critiques or suggestions!