Has anyone rolled their own maps yet?

[eluser]ricklee[/eluser]

For the technology-inclined reader, here’s how we put our map platform together. All web technologies are a “stack,” like layers in a map, and our map stack starts at the top with OpenLayers, which provides the click’n’drag’n’zoom interface. The next step down in the stack is Mapnik, which renders geospatial data into graphical images. At the bottom of the stack is our collection of geospatial data, which includes TIGER/Line and shapefiles from various city governments, as well as databases and tools that operate on that data, such as PostGIS, Shapely, and OGR. Finally, the “secret sauce” layer in the stack is TileCache, which actually sits between OpenLayers and Mapnik. It provides caching of the map tiles that are generated by Mapnik and served to OpenLayers. I say “secret” because it’s transparent to both the layers it sits between, and also because it greatly speeds up the entire stack, making it possible to deploy and scale a large mapping application. It’s worth mentioning that all these layers of the stack are open source or licensed freely. If you can build and deploy a web application, you can build and deploy a complete standalone geospatial and mapping application. The tools and data are there for the taking.

http://blog.everyblock.com/2008/feb/18/maps/

EveryBlock uses Django so I assume most of these tools are Python-based. Has anyone done something similar with PHP?