After you’ve designed your custom styles for MapBox Streets and have some data overlays, whether from a TileMill layer or data from an API, the next step is getting your maps online. We’re releasing two Map Site templates to help jumpstart the process of building fast and beautiful fullscreen map visualizations.
The Map Site templates are a great way to feature your maps. The first template is a Data Exploration Map Site that lets users toggle on overlays of your custom TileMill maps. Take your own spreadsheets, map them in TileMill, and share and explore them through this template. It makes for a great news app too to explore the spatial relationship between featured datasets. Or modify it to make a clean portfolio site to show off your cartographic skills. We’ve made dozens of custom projects using this kind of template. It’s designed to be very versatile.
The second template is a Realtime Data Feed Map Site demonstrating a common use case we see - visualizing locations from an API on a beautiful custom MapBox map. For this template we’ve put together a simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript template that pulls in Twitter searches and plots the results. Modify this template to visualize live or dynamic data, like tweets or perhaps search results from your web application, and map your store locations, projects, content, or anything else with a location.
Getting Started
With some web development experience, using the Map Site templates should be straightforward. You can fork them on GitHub or download their source to your own server, and hack up to suit your needs. We’ve documented the process for modifying these templates to use with your own maps too. Check out our Map Site templates to get started now.
A big thank you to the MIX Market for supporting some of the core template development that we are now open sourcing.