Update After talking to a lot of people about the future of MapRoulette and getting a lot of great feedback, I decided to abandon the Django effort I wrote about here. The New MapRoulette is coming together nicely! See its progress on Github.

I recently started looking into Django, the seminal Python web application framework. I like what I see much more that I thought I would, so much so that I am starting to rewrite MapRoulette as a Django application.

One thing I want to accomplish with a next version of MapRoulette is to make creating challenges much, much easier. For example, you should be able to define a challenge using an Overpass query. (You would be surprised how many annoying errors in OSM can be exposed with a pretty simple Overpass query! For example, here is a query that gives you all highway=tertiary that have no name in my home state Utah - 425 ways.)

So I needed a way for a Django application to access the Overpass API and display and store the results. That should be simple enough to accomplish using the Overpass API Python wrapper project I started a while ago. And it was!

If you are interested in checking it out or trying it for yourself, just clone the Overpass API Python wrapper project. Look for the Django example app in the examples folder. (At the time of writing, the example lives on the branch example that is not merged into master yet.)

Many thanks to all the contributors to the Overpass API Python wrapper project! Let me know if you want to contribute as well, be it code, testing, or documentation. Thanks!