Locations

We'd love to have you taking on a project at Drupal, and we also would /hugely/ appreciate bucket-loads of help on our geolocation-related stuff. This is really important work!

However, I personally am not sure where best to prioritize your efforts in this area. I'm going to cross-post this to the mapping/location group so hopefully you can find some folks to help you with the "Oooo!! Pick THIS!" part. :) You might want to actually write up a couple of these ideas in more detail, as it'll make it easier for the community to know exactly what you're trying to do and help you further refine the idea.

The next steps for you as a student are to start writing up a Summer of Code application based around your ideas. The application should talk about what you want to work on, why it's important for the Drupal project, and why you're qualified to work on it. Mention any previous contribution experience you have, as well as whatever schooling you have that's related to your area of interest. We also have some documenation about what we're looking for in Summer of Code applications.

Once you feel like you have your application pretty solid, I'd recommend sending it to a couple of folks first (first on my list would be bdragon but also see who else responds to your idea). They can provide feedback that you can use to incorporate back into your application before you send it "for real" later this month.

Good luck! :D

At the moment I am in the process in making a travel portal and I am sure people at Tourism Industry Solutions group would also find your proposed projects of interest.

For now I have stored lat/longs as CCK fields(text fields) for the nodes, and i have plans to list "nearby locations" based on actual distance. For me i was thinking of hacking in some php into contemplate as my knowledge of Drupal and php is very limited. would be really helpful if there was a function similar to taxonomy_select_nodes which selects nodes based on their distance.

-Sajal Kayan

I agree this is an exciting area that can definitely use some more help. However, the "location module space" of Drupal is already overcrowded with half-finished solutions. I think both the project and the student would be better served by focusing on improving the existing solutions rather than building entirely new ones. It sounds like you are interested in writing lots of new code - any chance you could instead prepare a plan for specific ways you could fix one of the existing modules/module-groups?

--
_{Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard}

I'm amazed at how fast everyone is at evaluating my idea. The truth is, that I wasn't aware of the location module which is currently in development. I had only seen the map cck element and thought that I can do better than that. It seems that I have not done enough research before posting my ideas. You're obviously totally right, it makes a lot more sense to channel my efforts into the existing modules and make them better instead of starting from scartch.

So I what I'm gonna do is look into that module, try it out and try to contact the developers, if they would like to have me on the team.

I'm not quite sure about the SOC rules though. Do you know if participating in a group is a good enough a deliverable? I understand, that I need to have something to show, that I am responsible for, something I wrote.

Maybe I could contribute to the location module by adding a CCK field to it?

By now I'm sure you've discovered Google Static Maps:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/

This should take care of your 3rd point, "a javascript free fallback static image of the map for cell phones or browsers without js".

You might want to have the Drupal server fetch the image from Google and cache it. That way you can fetch the base map and draw markers on it (with GD for example) and store that for display. Why I mention this is that you cannot draw paths on static maps at the moment, so you'd have to have the server fetch/draw additions/display anyhow.

See http://groups.drupal.org/node/4323

There was also a location BoF at the recent DrupalCon in Boston -- See http://groups.drupal.org/node/9530 for some of the notes.

Cheers,

Bill

FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Hi Eikaa,

I work with Bdragon and co-presented with him and another colleague at Drupalcon on the upcoming changes for Location, Geo, Gmap, and the rest of the Drupal/mapping/GIS space. We're going to be applying to Google as a mentoring organization for SoC and our projects list will consist almost entirely of Drupal/mapping ideas. I think it would be great if you -- and any other Drupal/mapping-interested potential GSoC'ers -- would contact me via email to discuss some of these ideas and see what we can do about working together.

Jim, Chicago Technology Co-operative
www.chicagotech.org

Drupal has the potential to be the first open source and the ultimate GeoCMS. A number of people have great ideas and visions of how to do this, and consensus seems to be forming on approaches to make this happen.

I discussed the possibility of creating a GSoC project to follow through with this with Bdragon in Boston. Bdragon is keen to mentor this.

I have been considering taking this on as a student, but at this stage I think that is unlikely as I want to focus on other (non GSoC) projects.

Bevan/

The location.module roadmap that catch pointed out (http://groups.drupal.org/node/8346) is an excellent resource.

@eikaa: Have you spoken to BDragon about what specifically you might contribute to location.module under this project? I think it would be fabulous to have you work on Location for GSOC, but more specific goals are needed to make this a complete proposal.

I pinged BDragon in #drupal just now but seems he's not around.

Friendly reminder: Proposals get locked down tomorrow! This could be a great project. I hope to see the proposal get more specific in time!

Some items from that roadmap that you might want to consider:

* Further work on reducing the module footprint: optimizations
* Split the module into Address and Geocoding submodules
*CCK location field (there is already some code in the queue for this issue)

Something else/related that could be an interesting locations-related project, and again, it's a good idea to sync up w/ Bdragon and others to see if there's more detail on the road map or in the works already for this, but what about:

Build out an extensible geocoding API

• ability to add many geocoding services
• failure-to-geocode fallback support
  -- if the default geocoder can't get it, use a fallback(s) geocoder.
• let modules/tasks define what geocoder to use (good for where you know you need to use a specialty geocoding service)
• visual verification for the user when attempting to geocode
• verification queue for admins
• mass geocoding capability to geocode a bunch of addresses
• visual verification queue for quickly verifying a mass geocoding batch
• ability to send/suggest lat/lon for an address on collaborative mapping projects (where applicable)

Again, maybe there's a roadmap that defines this already somewhere, or already some code in action, but if not I thought it could be a good/useful project.