The main reason for the feature request would be to have our in-house modification to the interface included in the Zabbix provided front end. We did some modification to the Zabbix frontend back in 1.8.9 and had to work again to implements them in Zabbix 2.0.0. Therefore, we decided to provide you with patches in case you would think some of our added feature are worth it. We personally thought that those improvements makes the interface more convivial and more flexible. Each modification has it's own patch, which need to be deployed in sequence. We use them in our rpm build to keep the changes between repackaging. The patches does the following (in order of application):

dashboard_links.patch Changes the dashboard to displays Number of items statistics as links instead of simple text. Clicking the link lists the items in the selected state (i.e not supported). We also swapped the red and gray colors as, from our point of view, not supported is a problem while not monitored is more informative.

map_rotation.patch Changes the map generation and edition to allow users to specify a rotation to the labels. This supports 90, 180 and 270 degree.

map_colored_label Add a new label type: Colored. The label will take the color of the most critical status. I.e a problematic host will see it's label displayed in red instead of having the label displayed followed by the status. TODO: Change the color of DISABLED items to Gray when using colored labels, confusing otherwise.

map_connectors_anchors.patch Add the capability to decide where the connectors should be on the elements. The shortest distance is then calculated. Useful for Electrical diagrams where lots of machines ends up connected to the same device.

map_label_size.patch Provides the capability to decide the font_size on a map basis. Font size 8 is great for workstations, but are difficult to read from further than 1.5m-2m.

all.patch Provides all the patches at once (not applied in the rpm, but provided in case).

A cleaner implementation would requires addition of some fields in the database, but we didn't do it to make sure we could run any database script provided by Zabbix. Instead, we used existing label_location and drawtype field to store the information using decimals and hundreds. With the modifications done in the DAO (api/classes/CMap.php), it should be pretty quick to do that change.