Boat Position

Boat Position turns your WordPress site into a live tracking and logbook service for your boat.

The plugin is designed around the Teltonika RUTX50 router (*), a compact Linux-based 5G router with built-in GPS. A shell script on the router sends a position to your site every minute. The plugin stores each position, runs a state machine to group positions into trips and legs, and serves three public pages:

• Live map (/boat-position/map) — shows the current position on an OpenStreetMap/OpenSeaMap map with a rotating arrow icon when underway and an idle indicator when stopped. Visible voyage plans are drawn as dashed green routes with flag markers.
• Logbook (/boat-position/history) — calendar sidebar with trip history. Click any day to see the full route on the map. Logged-in editors can label harbour names and merge incorrectly split trips.
• Voyage plans (/boat-position/plans) — plan future voyages as ordered lists of waypoints with optional ETAs. Multiple plans are supported; each plan can be toggled visible/hidden on the map independently.

The plugin also adds a boat log built on ordinary WordPress posts: place a post in the Boat Log category, give it coordinates (or default to the boat’s latest known position), and it appears as a marker on the live map. Your theme handles all writing and display, and the [boat_log_map_link] shortcode links a post back to the map and animates to its location.

Over 150 Danish harbours are included as seed data so harbour names are detected automatically from GPS coordinates.

No third-party services or API keys are required beyond your own WordPress site. Maps are rendered using the free Leaflet.js library with OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap tiles.

(*) There are other alternatives to using the RTUTX50 router, any device that has access to a GPS and the internet can be configured as the source of position data. E.g. a linux machine like Rasberry PI connected to either its own GPS or the boat NMEA data.