Advice whether to use Mapstore2 standalone

[maziz...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I have two questions;

There is the Mapstore2 stand-alone application and there is Mapstore2 which is the mapping client to Geonode. What do people take into account when making the choice

I am trying to decide whether to go with Mapstore2 as a stand-alone application (https://mappe.comune.genova.it/MapStore2/#/) or Geonode (https://data.whanganui.govt.nz/)

My use case is in to deploy in municipalities:

1. The standard application with no customisation (except to change the look and feel)

2. Manage users (both Mapstore2 and Geonode have this functionality)

3. Build focused applications e.g Asset Register Application

There seems to be a tight integration between Mapstore2 and Geoserver - is my understanding correct? Can I for example use QGIS Server without having to first customise Mapstore2

I greatly appreciate your valuable advice.

[Erwin Sterrenburg]

They both have a learning curve at the beginning, but in my experience GeoNode does provide you with everything MapStore does + more functions + more flexibility.

I picked MapStore some time ago, mainly since the GeoExplorer in GeoNode was really ugly and outdated and it was not fully clear yet if GeoNode would make the leap to Python 3, yet now I do regret this choice (and in fact am migrating the project to GeoNode. Biggest upsides:

• Better support for metadata and a metadata catalogue supported out of the box (which was not that important, until it was...)
  
• Support for documents (wasn't in scope till it was, my additional MapStore resource type + separate "document-service" checking the authentication was way too hacky)
• More flexibility (adding extra attributes to MapStore resources and querying on these attributes is also more hacky then it should be)
• More fine-grained permission model
• Almost all goodies specific to MapStore seems to end up in GeoNode faster and faster (the only thing I really miss is the MapImport plugin that enables the user to quickly add a shapelfile, geojson or kml to a map)

Biggest downside:

• GeoNode has a few more moving parts, so it can be harder to deploy and manage.

So, unless MapStore is the perfect with and scope will remain the same, go for GeoNode (or use something else / an existing system to cater for other needs and use the MapStore embedded, but ).

With regard to QGIS server, simply showing a layer on the map with a WMS or WMTS should just work. However, some functionality will not work (e.g. statistics calculations for the widgets) and there's not integration of authentication.

Erwin