Google Maps with Geocoding

Hi aev,

No, there's no way to get the users location automatically that is guaranteed to work across multiple browsers.

The simplest is to ask them to enter their zip/postal code and lookup based on that.

Newer browser do have a way to prompt the use for their location:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=browser+geolocation+api

And you can use web services to get a location based on ip (accuracy varies anywhere from neighborhood level to country level based on the IP)
http://www.google.ca/search?q=ip+to+location

Hope that helps!

No, we don't have any plans to support those. The problem is they're not reliable enough, yet.

But yes, IP to Location can be done without asking the user anything. That's how they geotarget advertising. You won't know how accurate it is though, you could get their neighborhood or their country.

Dave,
Any word when the geocoding plugin will be available? Once it's available would the CMS user be able to enter an address and generate a map automatically from goggle so it would appear on the web site for the page it was enter into?

I can certainly use this, so real estate agents can load maps to properly listing addresses instantly through CMS Builder.

Hi Zickey,

No ETA on this yet but we have a number of nearly finished plugins we need to release soon.

It doesn't show a map currently, it just lets them enter an address and it automatically geocodes it to lng/lat coordinates on save.

And it's not completely plug and play yet.. There's still a bit of code. But it does a lot of the work. We need some more demos and examples for it still.

I have a similar need to take a users' entered location and perform searches of locations stored in CMSB based on proximity. A Canadian postal code search would be ideal but if a geocoded address feature were available in the plug-in then that could be made to work.

Does anyone know if the plug-in under development would have such a function?

J.

Hi InHouse,

The geocoding plugin will take addresses (postal codes should work too) and turn them into (Lat,Lng) coordinates. That would be the first step in doing proximity searches.

A proximity search is basically accomplished by defining a "minimum bounding rectangle" of (Lat,Lng) coords around your centre point (to quickly cull very distant locations.) If the Earth were perfectly flat, this would be as simple as:

WHERE lat BETWEEN (<?php echo $record['lat'] - $dist ?> AND <?php echo $record['lat'] + $dist ?>) AND lng BETWEEN (<?php echo $record['lng'] - $dist ?> AND <?php echo $record['lng'] + $dist ?>)

For better precision, you'll need to adjust your longitude delta depending on the latitude (since 1° of lng decreases from 111km to 0km as you approach a pole.)

If you need to sort by distance and cull results which are farther than your max_dist (i.e. ones you caught with your rectangle but aren't in your circle,) you'll need to also use the Distance Formula (but for speed, skip the sqrt() part until you get your results back from MySQL.)

In short, it's somewhat complicated to do right. We may include examples with the plugin, and if not, we're available to help out through consulting, which should be quick because we've done this before. :)

I hope this helps!

Thanks Chris. Your commentary took me back to my undergrad days working with GIS transformations.

Looking forward to the new widget!

J.