Shelter Map VE

A WordPress plugin that puts the 4,538 civil protection shelters of Romania on a clustered Leaflet map — with county and sector filtering, diacritic-insensitive search and a nearest-shelter lookup.

No map API key. No billing account. No database tables, no queries, no cookies, no settings page.

Why

It was written to replace WP Google Maps on a site that had the shelter registers in it. The old setup pulled in 14 JavaScript files (650 KB uncompressed) plus the Google Maps JavaScript API, and fetched the markers over a REST round trip. This ships ~130 KB gzipped in total, all static and cacheable, and the map only loads once it nears the viewport.

Install

Download shelter-map-ve.zip from the latest release and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, or drop the folder into wp-content/plugins/.

Then put the shortcode in a page:

[smve_map]

Attributes, all optional:

zoom, lat and lng set the view shown before the shelters arrive; once they have, the map frames whatever is currently displayed.

What it does

• Clusters every shelter, so several thousand markers stay usable on a phone.
• Filters by county, and by sector inside Bucharest.
• Searches shelter names and addresses without caring about diacritics — timisoara finds Timișoara.
• Finds the nearest shelter to the visitor, across the whole set rather than the current filter, and shows the distance.
• Gives every shelter a directions link that opens the visitor's own maps app.
• Renders the county navigation and, at ?county=<slug>, that county's full list on the server — so both work without JavaScript and are indexable.

How the data is built

Each shelter carries only a name, an address and coordinates. The county is not parsed out of the address — matching on text gets it right about 42% of the time and trips over street names — it is computed offline by point-in-polygon against Romanian county boundaries and shipped inside the data files. Nothing is computed at runtime.

The pipeline lives in build/ and is deterministic: re-running it on unchanged input reproduces byte-identical output.

sh      build/fetch-boundaries.sh     # county polygons, ~32 MB, not committed
python3 build/build-data.py           # source-data/markers-raw.tsv -> data/*.json
python3 build/make-mo.py              # languages/*.po and *.mo
php     tests/render-test.php         # 27 assertions, no WordPress needed
python3 build/make-zip.py             # dist/shelter-map-ve.zip

Data quality

The source registers are not error-free. Thirteen records name a Bucharest sector in their own address but sit outside Bucharest on the map, and the corruption is systematic — the integer part of the latitude or longitude is one too high (45.44229,27.13429 where 44.44226,26.13433 was meant). Twelve were re-geocoded against OpenStreetMap and verified on street, sector and house number; one could not be found and kept its original coordinates.

That rule only catches the Bucharest cases. A full audit of all 4,538 geocodes has not been done, and it is likely that other counties carry similar errors. Corrections are welcome through the issue tracker.

Requirements

WordPress 5.8+, PHP 7.4+. No Composer, no npm, no build step for the plugin's own code.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE, which also covers the bundled Leaflet and Leaflet.markercluster and credits the boundary data.