Another temporary detour

While I was deep into reviving mapguide-rest to make sure it works with the PHP 8.1 bundled with MapGuide Open Source 4.0, I missed the memo that Stamen Maps is now under new management: Stadia Maps.

The most important aspect of this announcement was that come October 2023 (a month from now), current stamen tile URLs may stop redirecting/working and you should have migrated over to Stadia Maps by then.

Because Stamen tiles carried the same role as OpenStreetMap as a freely accessible base tiled layer for various open source projects of mine, this announcement has thrown a spanner in my works because come next month, Stamen tiles may not work and for continued support for these layers would require migration over to Stadia Maps.

So I have momentarily suspended my work on mapguide-rest to give focus to one of my other projects affected by this announcement: My VSCode map preview extension.

Because continued support for stamen map tiles requires migrating the extension over to use Stadia Maps, we might as well take this opportunity to add support in the extension for other base layers that Stadia Maps offers. And while we're at it, we might as well go all the way and add in Bing Maps, XYZ and WMTS base layers as well.

Or, just have a gander at this clip for a taste of what the next version of the VSCode map preview extension can do!

The next version of the extension will drop real soon and then it is back to mapguide-rest development.