Styling map and generating tiles for Mapnik and/or GeoServer?

Question

I have almost 5 shapefile layers(contains point,line,polygon), now I want to style different layers, for example, different layers, different attributes of the same layer will rendered with different symbols, and some feature will only be rendered at a certain zoom and etc.

I wonder how do you do this kind of job?

I know both mapnik and geoserver, however none of them have any GUI to do the symbol job.

Any other alternatives?

Answer 1

You can use Tilemill to create a cartocss style which you can then use with Mapnik (might need to convert to Mapnik XML).

GeoServer supports SLD styles which you can create with many GIS tools, for example QGIS or OpenJUMP.