CUNY Academic Commons

I wrote the following:
"Aaron -
Our tech team suggest that you create the maps at https://storymap.knightlab.com/. If that's acceptable, he will write a brief shortcode handler for it. Please let me know. "

Hope that was okay - not offer the more expensive option.

But can you explain a little further for me - do you need an already-existing map before you write the handler? How does the user get maps on to his site? Very sorry for my ignorance here, but hopefully if I can see the process through, then I'll understand it for future queries.

I appreciate your conservatism :)

I'm not 100% clear on the distinction between the software and the service here, but from what I can gather, StoryMapJS is a piece of software that is developed by the folks who build https://storymap.knightlab.com. It's possible to take StoryMapJS and use it to build your own story-maps completely within your own environment, which is what I assume the plugin does. But https://storymap.knightlab.com also allows users to create maps right on the site, and then provides a "Share" button that contains some embed code. Using this embed code, the map can be embedded in any website, while still being served from the knightlab.com hub. A shortcode tool like I'm suggesting would allow the user to grab some unique identifier from knightlab.com - I think that each map has an ID or URL that can easily be figured out - and then paste it into a [storymap url="foo"] shortcode. The shortcode would then generate the necessary embed code for the Commons site. (We can't allow arbitrary embed code to be pasted by normal users, for security reasons.)