I am logged in as Rose, but this is her husband, Steve.
I wanted to offer a few thoughts on this, since I spent several hundred hours writing a php/MySQL-based locator program for our website, and spent the last couple of years tweaking it.
You can see our "Find People" system
here . Look around and see what you think. It maps member locations down to the city/state level. It currently supportes the US, Canada, and Australia.
This locator system was written before we started using UBBthreads on the website, and obviously the thought of developing an integration with the forums has occupied my thoughts. This is where I can offer some information and some opinions.
1. Not all of the people who participate in forums want to have themselves located on a map. That argues for an "opt-in" strategy...which is all just as well anyway since you would want them to provide information that UBB doesn't capture. The minimum necessary would be:
- UBB login and/or display name
- Their location - City, State, Country, (don't use zipcodes, since they limit you to the US)
Beyond this minimum info, you can optionally capture more. On my site, since it is for Australian Expats, I ask for Origin information and also allow them to post a comment about themselves.
2. I don't recommend relying on a third-party service like Googlemaps for displaying data. They are very dynamic in changing their url information. You would be rewriting code to keep up with them every other week, and dependant on their whims for system changes.
3. Using zip codes limits you essentially to the US, and as Gizmo mentioned, there is no reliable way to repeatably get from zip codes to latitude/longitude information. There IS, however, a relatively easy way to get from city/state/country information to latitude/longitude that I discovered. Geobytes offers a free, comprehensive, and downloadable comma-delimited text-based database of world cities and their lat/longs. I have written parser code to return lat/long data when city/state/country is entered. This is how I convert city/state/country country to lat/long for the sytem my site uses.
The download site for the Geobytes GeoWorldMap is
here . Itis a virtual goldmine of parsable information on most of the worlds major and even very minor towns and cities, and they give it away for 30 day evaluation, $10US to keep and use it! Unbelievable, and Kudos to them for their generosity. It solved one of my biggest problems for creating a locator system, having an on-server source of lat/long information for world cities.
3. Integrating a locator system with UBB is the sticky point, but frankly, most of the integration would take place inside the third-party software code. Existing forum members would have to use a link from the forum (or a preferences checkbox) to move to the locator sign-up and enter their existing UBB login and/or display name information. Newly registering UBBthreads users could possibly opt-in during registration for the location service via a mod.
Currently my website locator system operates as a distict entity from UBBthreads, but I am interested in pursuing an integration strategy if the idea has enough support and appeal from other UBBthreads forum hosts. For my end of the deal, I would gladly offer the php code for my current locator system without cost to anyone who is interested in developing integration with UBBthreads. If an integration is successful, I would also offer the the locator code as a free mod. I am not in this for bucks.
Your thoughts on the above are solicited and welcomed.
