Mapping in Mexico...
I am working on a large Drupal project for an anthropology program at my university, which is both a research tool (a means to enter and catalog information) and a teaching tool (anthro students can search the data and do 'virtual visual ethnography,' compiling field research to write their own paper). Anyway, cool concept, very powerful... ummm... 25,000 nodes and counting.
However, I can't map any of it easily because Google Maps has little to no road data on Mexico, and geocoding is not an option (besides, most people in these villages don't have addresses). We have our users entering in rough locative information using Gmap and satellite views, but there are some villages that we work with who have no entries in Google or Yahoo maps. Hopefully with greater KML support I could overlay my own maps with actual streets and village names...
Basically, I would like to keep the ability to enter lat & long in the location module, but also allow users to just select a village name from a CCK field which would then populate the node's location information (we are region-specific, so we are working with 35 towns). I've been fiddling with CCK and location/views for a while now and can't get it to work... any ideas?
What exactly can't you get to work?
Sounds like an interesting project. What exactly can't you get to work?
I'm starting on a project where a lot of the locations are going to be in countries with little road data, and am planning just to use the satellite view as that can provide a lot of detail.
More specifics
We have a list of long/lat coordinates for each village, so I first tried creating a lat/long CCK field and using the computed field module to fill these in when a user selected a village in another field (i.e. they select "La Tortuga" from a drop-down menu and the hidden lat/long fields are filled in by the computed module).
This is a less than desirable workaround: it is difficult to administer and basically stacks all the nodes related to a village on top of eachother. Our map is starting to get crowded! I have posted a note in CCK as well to see if anyone has a better solution. I wanted to just use the value/label pipe setup in a CCK text field (like "12.78, 45.67 | Conca") but gmap views need one field for latitude and one for longitude.
Question
May I ask where did you get the Mexico village / zip code database you are using? I am trying to find a reliable one to download / buy for a project I am working on. Zip code / postal code's coordinates (lat/lon) would do for me, but of course if there is something better available it would be more than welcome.
Thanks!