MCF User Guide
Virtual Tour
The Virtual Tour gives residents and visitors a street-level walk through your parish. A split-panel view pairs a map with Google Street View, so people can click a landmark and see it from the road — ideal for showing off the village green, the church, local amenities or a new development.
How the tour works
The tour is a single page with two panels side by side:
- On one side, a map of your parish with markers for each Point of Interest.
- On the other, a Street View panel.
When a resident selects a marker — or clicks a spot on the map — the Street View panel jumps to that location, letting them look around as if they were standing there. Your parish boundary can be drawn over the map as an outline.
Before you begin
The Virtual Tour uses Google's mapping service, so it needs a Google Maps API key with the Maps and Street View services enabled. This is usually set up once for the council. If the tour is not appearing, ask your super administrator or whoever set the site up to check the key — you do not need to repeat this for every Point of Interest.
The tour centres on the parish coordinates you set in Site Settings › Parish Location — the same coordinates used by the Interactive Map and Weather. Set those once and the tour opens in the right place.
Adding Points of Interest
Points of Interest (POIs) are the landmarks the tour highlights — each one becomes a marker on the map and a place residents can jump to in Street View.
- Go to Settings › Virtual Tour Settings.
- In the Points of Interest list, add an entry for each landmark.
- For each Point of Interest, set:
- Name — what the marker is labelled, e.g. "St Mary's Church".
- Latitude and longitude — its exact position.
- Colour — pick a marker colour to group or distinguish landmarks.
- Select Save to publish your changes.
Find the precise spot on Google Maps, right-click it and copy the coordinates that appear, then paste them into the latitude and longitude fields. That puts the marker exactly where you want it.
Editing Points of Interest on the page
As well as the settings list, the tour offers an on-page edit mode so you can position markers visually against the live map, rather than typing coordinates by hand — handy when you want a marker in just the right place. Open the tour, switch on edit mode, and adjust the markers directly, then save.
A handful of well-chosen landmarks makes for a clearer tour than dozens of markers. Pick the places residents and visitors most want to see — key amenities, heritage sites, and the heart of the village.