Posted by mudsurfer on June 16, 2011 at 7:34am
Does anyone have any firsthand advice or experience in using Location module for Australian locations? I have client that is looking for functionality including geo locating nodes, and then finding specific nodes within x km of user/other node. Most likely would use post code as a primary location mechanism.
My trawling of d.o. Suggests Location module should assist, and appears very popular.
Any experiences or alternatives for Australian context?
Comments
Not me personally, but i know
Not me personally, but i know the people involved...
http://www.thesharehood.org/
I have done Australian mapping, but not proximity specifically.
I've used location module to
I've used location module to do proximity searches on a couple of sites. I did the proximity search database query myself using a couple of the location module functions to do the geocoding and to generate part of the query to be run. Couldn't get the views integration proximity search working. An example of the resulting store locator is here:
http://www.nakedtan.com.au/content/australia-locations
If you are limiting yourself to Australia then Australia Post also has a database of locales and postcodes available for download which might make a good starting point and save some calls to the google geocoder as it also includes the geographical coordinates of the locales.
Yeah location does geo
Yeah location does geo location of nodes and then proximity searching via views.
Not sure about using postcode though, pretty sure that's US only for location.
Worth a try: OpenLayers
Unfortunately I can't give advice on the details since I haven't used that particular functionality, but OpenLayers does support proximity based map views as well. In general, if I'd have to place a bet on "future-proof"-ness, I'd go OpenLayers (even if the current usage statistics don't necessarily support that view).
To get the initial geocoding done (if it's done manually), I highly recommend the OpenLayers Geocoder module. Best UI/UX I have seen so far for that use case.
I've submitted a patch that allows for country-specific preferences. Whichever way you go, let us know how you went and what worked ;)
Worth a try: OpenLayers
Unfortunately I can't give advice on the details since I haven't used that particular functionality, but OpenLayers does support proximity based map views as well. In general, if I'd have to place a bet on "future-proof"-ness, I'd go OpenLayers (even if the current usage statistics don't necessarily support that view).
To get the initial geocoding done (if it's done manually), I highly recommend the OpenLayers Geocoder module. Best UI/UX I have seen so far for that use case.
I've submitted a patch that allows for country-specific preferences. Whichever way you go, let us know how you went and what worked ;)
Australian postcodes
just set up location module for a customer, had proximity working ok using standard funcitonality. Had to convert suburb names to postcodes before loading the view manually though.
Then they decided they wanted to allow advertisers to select their coverage area, 10km, 30km, 60km, state, national. When the advertiser selected their coverage area I added the bounding co-ordinates to the node table, then wrote a custom views argument that found all nodes who bounding co-cords wrapped the postcode's co-oridinates.
australian postcodes
zipcodes.au.mysql is in the location/database folder
Thanks All
Thanks all, seems to be a few options there to give a whirl. Looks like Open Layers is the direction to try first.
I'll report back as to which way I end up going.
Thanks