Looking for Advice - Proximity searching by address in D6

I created something like this using a sort-of hybrid system:

Location CCK does some lifting for getting longitudes and latitudes of users based on their specific addresses but a custom module does a proximity search with a bounding box using a formula that gets distance in miles to our venues using birds-eye-view and factors in the curvature of the earth. I believe the Location API has this built into it but we had a system in place prior to our use with Drupal 6.

My other custom piece is a script that does a nightly grab of geocodes from Google (they limit you to 15,000 queries a day) based on the venues that sell our beer, which in theory could have been a content type. But since there's about 500k venues we decided not to muck up our regular content with an ever-changing list of venues. We also wanted to throw in door-to-door Google directions for registered users and thus required specific geocodes.

http://www.magichat.net/sipcode/02113

Adam
Magic Hat Brewing Company

I'm very interested in this sort of functionality, too. It looks like proximity searching with the Location module has been a challenge for a long time and more recently with Location CCK. However, I definitely think that Location CCK and the accompanying modules will mature eventually to offer address proximity searching along with good integration with Drupal, Views, etc. but I'm skeptical that this will happen quickly.

In the meantime, I've come across a couple of alternatives which I'm considering (but haven't yet tried):

Firstly, there's the phpGoogleStoreLocator (http://crystaldawn.net/). This seems to be a fairly complete and full-featured solution, however, it's not quite a Drupal module -- it seems to have its own installer and admin, so none of your data will be available outside of this application. It also looks like it only receives intermittent attention from the maintainer and there seems to be a number of comments from grumbling users on Drupal.org about unhappy experiences. I'm not so enthusiastic about this one.

More promisingly, CiviCRM (http://www.civicrm.org/) offers a proximity search as one of its Custom Search options. The proximity search works with just an address, province, and country but disappointingly outputs the results as a list (i,e. no map!) by default. Nevertheless, it is possible to map the locations on the list in an extra step, so I expect that it will be possible to redirect the search result immediately to the map instead. Also, the map does not provide incremental numbering, although this may also be configurable with a little tweaking, nor does it output a legend. However, the markers contain info windows with location details and a link to the google maps 'get directions' feature.

If you don't know much about CiviCRM, you'll find that it is a fairly oversized application. In our case, CiviCRM offers some additional features that we may want to utilize within our organization, but otherwise you might find it overkill to set it up just for the purposes of proximity searching. I also understand there to be some integration between CiviCRM and the Location module, however, I have yet to confirm that and I'm not sure if that includes the Location CCK module as well.

Hope that's helpful. I'll post again if I make any headway with my own proximity search plans.

Thanks for the tip, tinem and pixelmord. I got my google map Store Locator reading data from my Drupal databases relatively painlessly. tinem, I don't supposed you'd be able to share an example of some of the map customization that have you have done. I'm not exactly a pro with the google maps api (or javascript for that matter!). Thanks again!

leinardo wrote: Thanks for the tip, tinem and pixelmord. I got my google map Store Locator reading data from my Drupal databases relatively painlessly. tinem, I don't supposed you'd be able to share an example of some of the map customization that have you have done. I'm not exactly a pro with the google maps api (or javascript for that matter!). Thanks again!

What have you made until now and what do you need help to? Let us see your site, please.

This is the link to my development mirror.

Tutorial implemented as a Drupal module.

I have the location module installed and I used a location CCK field in a custom content type. I wrote a custom module and put all of the embedded style information into a service_locator.css. This allows you to customize the look by changing the CSS. I also have the CSS for display of my custom content type associated with this particular map. I put all of the JavaScript into service_locator.js. These two files get loaded onto the page by my theme_service_locator() function. I do the proximity search on the {location} data table and then use {location_instance} to link back to my node which is my custom content type.

Current Status

The API key and several other things are still hard coded in the JavaScript. The text above and below the map can be changed via the administration menu and the title is changed in the Menu administration. As this is my first attempt at writing a module I am sure that there are many improvements that can be made to the coding. I plan to make the JavaScript do an HTTPrequest as it loads so that I can pass the set up configuration to the JavaScript. Then I will be able to add the option to always use miles, always use kilometers, or make it user selectable as part of the admin page for my custom module. I will also be able to add the API key and make the drop down menu for the distances selectable. As you can see I did little to customization to the map itself. It is straight from the tutorial.

Warning!! since the supplied link is to a development site it is subject to periodic outages and odd behavior. Currently there are very few locations outside of the United States so test it with US City,State pairs and Zip Codes.

Thanks for the link.
Becky

Hi, I have the following problem.
1) I would like to show the proximity between a postal code or city somebody types in, and the latitude longtitude of a node in my site.
The selecting of nodes could be done through the following:
2a) The node he/she can select by country, then area, then place. The country, area and place somebody selects are taxonomy terms in the site. After selected these, nodes tagged with the specific term show up with the proximity from the typed in postal code.
2b) Or he/she can type in an amount of kilometres/miles and then all nodes in the proximity of this amount will show up with the possibiltiy to set a marge of 10-15 kilometres from the typed in amount of kilometres.

I would very much like to use a location view and a normal view with exposed values of the taxonomy terms, or a combination of both. How would I proceed to get the proximity working from a certain postal code to above 2a and 2b selection-methods?

EDIT: I have allready a "regular" location view with proximity working, but it only works for a postal code within the same selected country. I would very much like to get the 2a, 2b selection methods working.

Thanks a lot in advance for your reply!
greetings,
Martijn