Trackserver, tutorial

Hi,

As I was a complete ignorant of WordPress, and I have only a basic HTML knowledge, I had some problems to have the trackserver up and running. I must say that the installation procedure described in the Trackserver plugin is really cryptic, and unless you have some previous experience in wordpress, not very helpful.

But eventually I achieved it, and I thought that perhaps my experience could be useful for someone else, so I am writing this sort of tutorial of how I did it. If you find it useful, feel free to use it and correct it if you find any inaccuracy.

Prerequisites

A web server with wordpress installed (see requirements for wordpress).

Installation procedure

First yopu must have a wordpress web page in place, and go to the administration desktop.

Use WordPress’ built-in plugin installer, or copy the folder from the plugin archive to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Once you have the trackserver plugin installed and active, a track database is created. You can upload tracks to it (GPX format), and view them in a map. Also you can edit the name, source and include some comments.

You can access this database from the WordPress administration page selecting “Trackserver”, and “Manage Tracks”

Once you have this database in place you can build pages to present your tracks. It is reallly easy , just open the editor of the page and include the following sentence in the place were you want the map with the track to be presented:

[tsmap track=xx] where xx is the track ID in the database

After this, you should see the map with the track in your web page. There are several presentation optinos, that can be found in the FAQ of the Trackserver plugin.

Live tracking

Live tracking allows the presentation of the track and the position of a mobile phone in real time, using one of the several mobile apps supported. See the description of the plugin. In the wordpress administration page “Trackserver” “Options” you can find the different services, and the settings required for each one (here you can find the “slug” to be set for the application to work).

I was already using Oruxmaps, so I configured the trackserver to use MapMyTracks settings.

Configure the slugs that the plugin will listen on for location updates.

In the Wodpress administration panel go to “Settings”, “Permalinks”

In the “Permalinks” screen select “Custom structure”, and in the corresponding field put the “slug” according the required setting. In my case, the slug was \mapmytracks

Configure your mobile apps and start tracking!

In the “options” of the trackserver you can find the URL to be set in the mobile application. Additionally you must set the userand password for the phone to access the web page.

Once you have the mobile phone configured, whenever you start a new track, a corresponding track is created in the trackserver database, which is updated by the mobile application.

Use the shortcode [tsmap] to include maps and tracks in your posts and pages.

In order to present this Live track in the page, you must include the following sentence in the place were you want the map with the track to be presented:

[tsmap track=live]

After this, you should see the map with the track in your web page. as before, there are several presentation optinos, that can be found in the FAQ of the Trackserver plugin.