Clouds and Spaceships

Description

A suite for Worldbuilders, Storytellers, and Mapmakers – Turn an image into an interactive canvas to create informational maps and stories, which can be linked with wiki articles and glossaries.

Three toolsets sit behind one CNS settings screen: Wiki, Maps and Stories. The wiki can be switched off if you do not need it, and the glossary is off until you turn it on.

Maps

A canvas map editor with its own admin screen. Place objects, draw areas, add labels, and publish the result through a block.

• Objects can render as a circle, square, diamond, icon or their own title as text, each with its own size, colours and border.
• Areas are drawn as polygons, rectangles, ellipses or bezier curves, with per-area fill, stroke and label styling.
• Any object or area can open an infobox drawer on click, either written inline or pulled from a linked post.
• MasterMaps nest maps inside each other: draw a region on a parent map and it links through to the child map.
• On the front end the map supports zoom, a fullscreen view, and visitor toggles that show or hide areas, objects and labels independently.

Wiki

Wiki articles nest inside one another, so a child article’s URL carries its parent’s path.

• Infobox, Infobox Group and Infobox Row blocks build a structured sidebar box. Its display mode either collapses groups on mobile or keeps everything expanded, and each group can override that.
• Wiki Card and Wiki Contents render a responsive card grid, filled by hand or automatically from your newest articles.
• An optional glossary (off by default) adds inline terms with hover definitions, plus a Glossary Index block that lists every entry grouped alphabetically or by category, with its own heading and entry colours, sizes and column count. Definitions and links are resolved when the page renders, so they never go stale.

Stories

A canvas editor for branching stories laid over one of your maps.

• Nodes, paths and directed edges, with substories holding the content shown at each node.
• The linked map renders underneath in full — its areas, objects, labels and infoboxes all stay interactive — while story elements draw on top and take click priority.
• The same zoom, fullscreen and layer toggles as the map block, inheriting the linked map’s control colours.
• Readers open a node from the canvas or from the list beside it. You can set a default thumbnail for stories without their own image, hide the list so nodes open only in a dialog, and stop the underlying map’s own elements responding to clicks if you want the story nodes to be the only thing readable.

Your world stays on your site

Clouds and Spaceships never sends anything anywhere. There is no account to create and no service to connect, no tracking and no analytics, and nothing is loaded from another server. It uses no external services at all: everything you write and draw stays in your own WordPress site.

Source code

The JavaScript and CSS in the build/ folder are compiled. The uncompiled source code and build tools are publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/Marian-L-M/clouds-and-spaceships-wp-plugin

To build it yourself, install Node.js (20.19 or later) and run npm ci followed by npm run build in the plugin folder. npm ci installs the exact dependency versions recorded in package-lock.json; the build uses @wordpress/scripts and writes the compiled files from src/ to build/.