Countries

In this section:

Adding a New Country
- Generating Maps
- Crop To

The site pulls its knowledge of countries from an initial fixture that is a current representation of ISO 3166-1 as of March 27th, 2015.

Adding a New Country

In the event a new country is added to ISO 3166-1, three changes should happen:

A developer should edit the fixture
In the admin panel, go to Countries > Add Country + and create a new country with the ISO 3166-1 Code and Name.
A developer should use the Cron Map script to generate a new set of map files. For more information, see Generating Maps.

Generating Maps

For detailed information, see the GitHub repository.

Wikipedia provides a beautiful SVG map of the world, complete with well-labeled country boundaries. This file is quite large, however, and we must manipulate it to highlight and zoom to specific countries. Performing this in the browser is workable when there is only one map, but when listing many images of countries, the DOM quickly exceeds a reasonable amount of memory. We have created a script that splits the world map into component countries, providing context in the form of surrounding countries and highlighting/zooming to the selected country.

To use the script, you must first install two python libraries: lxml and svg from source. Clone the latter repository within the peacecorps/peacecorps/scripts directory. Then run the script with the input SVG file and the output directory:

pip install lxml
git clone https://github.com/cjlano/svg.git
python cropmap.py ../static/peacecorps/img/BlankMap-World6.svg ../static/peacecorps/img/countries/

You will see several debug messages which can be safely ignored. Execution takes around 5 minutes to run on a decent machine.

Crop To

Similar to the above script, but zooms in to a particular area instead of a single country. This is useful if the automatically generated map for a specific country does not provide sufficient detail or otherwise look very good.

python croptoview.py ../static/peacecorps/img/BlankMap-World6.svg ../static/peacecorps/img/countries/esc.svg 700 560 125 125