A Public Participation, Neighbourhood Planning Support System running on Node.js.
Developed using the KeystoneJS Content Management System and mongoDB document store.
The application provides the following capabilities:
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Publish Plans
The system allows an administrator to publish neighbourhood plans. Plans can have geographic layers that can be rendered on a map to allow users get insights. Detailed plan descriptions can be read on screen and related documents can be downloaded.
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Comment
Users of the system can comment on existing plans and read comments of other users. Comments can be geolocated on a map using points, lines or polygons.
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Make Proposals
Users are allowed to make their own planning proposals that can be saved in the database. The proposals can then be mapped and accessed by the other users of the system as well as be commented.
A demo website can be accessed at the url:
http://maps.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/community-planner/
The application can be used without login in, however, if you select to login, you will be able to submit geolocated comments related to the published plans. You can login to the application by clicking on the link located at the top-right of the website. Please use the following test user credentials:
Email: [email protected]
Password: test
Click on the 'Plans' located at the top menu of the website and you will be navigated to the page displaying the published plans. Click on the vertical menu bar located to the right of the 'Plans' web page to open the application interaction panel. The panel provides several panel pages.
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Planning Projects Information panel page.
Use this panel page to create a new plan (if you are logged in to the system), to zoom to a plan, or open a plan. Once you open a plan more panel pages will be opened allowing you to obtain more information related to the published plan. The map would display layers related to the opened plan. You can interact with the map by clicking on the opened plan layers to obtain information related to individual features of the plan layers.
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Map Legend panel page.
The Map legend panel page provides an interactive legend displaying information related to the layers of the opened plan.
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Planning Projects Text / Detailed Plan Description
It is the panel page providing a detailed description of the plan as well as any other rich text information related to the opened plan. This is the page from which a user could obtain insights related to the opened plan.
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Files panel page
The files panel page provides files associated with the opened plan. A user could download these files from the panel page.
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Comments panel page
The comments panel page displays comments related to the opene plan that have been made by other users. Comments have the option to be geolocated, which means that before submiting a comment, a user is presented with options to add a marker or digitize the area of interest in the form of a polyline or a polygon on the map. This is to allow the user to indicate on the map the area for which the comment was made.
An administrator has access to the capabilities of the content management system. Thus, an administrator can create new complex plans, upload geospatial layers to the system and create plan maps to allow the geospatial layers to be rendered on the map. An administrator can upload files, provide plan texts and delete comments if necessary.
The application can be installed by downloading the zip file of the source code published in github or (if your system has git installed) by cloning the source code.
The web app uses the Mongo database. Therefore you need to install it if you don't have it already in your system. Once you install the MongoDB you can create a new database named 'community-planner' either using your terminal or a Mongo client like Robo 3T.
If you are using windows you can run from your terminal the batch file named import-database.bat located at the mongo-database subfolder of your installation. If you are using Linux modify the contents of the batch file appropriately or run the commands found there individually. Once the entire process is completed you should have the contents of your database loaded in Mongo.
Your system needs to have node installed (version 13.3.0 has been tested) and npm installed (version 6.13.1 has been tested). Once these are installed you need to navigate to the installation folder and run in your terminal the following command:
npm install
The command will run the web app installation script which is going to donwload all the necessary node modules to your system. The script will probably run for long, so be patient.
Once the script finishes, you need to rename the sample.env file to .env, or create a new .env file and copy there the contents of the sample.env file. You need also to create an account to mailgun and copy your authorization token inside the .env file. the file contains important information allowing the application to run. The cookie secret found in the file is used to encode/decode the passwords of the users of the Mongo database.
Then all you need to do to run the application is to type the following command in your terminal:
node community-planner.js
The command will start the server of the application. The server uses port 8084 of your system. You can change the port by editing the 'community-planner.js' initialization script. Once the server is started you can use your preferable web browser to navigate to the following url:
http://localhost:8084
This will display the application to your browser.
You can login to the system using the following credentials:
Email: [email protected]
Password: admin
In case you need to install the app for public use you MUST change the COOKIE_SECRET in the .env file of the application. This is used to encode passwords in your Mongo database, so make sure you are using a clean database, otherwise old users or plans won't work.
The administration pages of the application can be accessed in the following url:
http://localhost:8084/keystone/