EventFinder is Toast

Not sure where to tell people this, but here goes...

So, after much goofing around with Views, Location, Gmaps, node_import and a bunch of other stuff, I have come to the conclusion there is no reason to support eventfinder going forward. A savvy admin can configure about 90% of what eventfinder does with other modules at this point, and I am about to release a write up about it. There were 2 things killing that module, one was the external depenencies and need to update it pretty much every 4 weeks, the other was the fact it was hard for a lot of people to configure. No matter how much documentation I provided people were still not figuring it out.

There are a couple parts of eventfinder which are not present in other modules, and I am working on simpler modules just dealing with these aspects of functionality. The first is MMA searches, the ability to define a major metropolitan area and perform an event lookup against it. This would be something that takes, for instance, all the postal codes within a region defined as 'San Francisco' and finds matching events. I have collected information on how an MMA is defined in North and South America, as well as parts of Europe, and plan on releasing a module that is capable of defining the regions where MMA searches are performed. The second is saved searches, there is no module that will proactively search a Drupal site for events in a specific region and notify users about them. I have cribbed most of that code from the original EventFinder and am planning to release it sometime after 5.0 becomes official.

M