A simplest Mapnik plugin

We have a new ultra simple “hello world” plugin in Mapnik.

This should be useful for anyone interested in adding new datasource plugins for any fancy new formats that come online.

To build it you need Mapnik >= 2.0 and a custom build flag:

./configure SAMPLE_INPUT_PLUGINS=True

See the basic intro to the idea of “template” plugins, see the “hello world” plugin readme find the code.

To test the plugin you can render a map like:

cd plugins/input/templates/helloworld
nik2img.py test.xml hello.png -d 256 256

Which should produce:

If you want to build the plugin outside of the Mapnik build system, you can do that by using the sample Makefile:

cd plugins/input/templates/helloworld
make
make deploy