[GUEST SPEAKER] January GRupal Meetup + Mapping + GeoLocation = ♥

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pichot's picture
Start: 
2012-01-09 18:00 - 19:30 America/Detroit
Event type: 
User group meeting

Brandon Morrison (http://drupal.org/user/77766) will be coming up from South Bend to speak with us! He's the maintainer of the GeoField module (http://drupal.org/project/geofield) and has been involved with several Drupal mapping projects. He'll be talking about using Drupal for mapping and geolocation. His talk is titled "The current state of geospatial Drupal".

UPDATE: Instead of heading to our typical haunt after the meetup, I suggest we go to the inaugural Grand Rapids GitHub Drinkup at Stella's (https://github.com/blog/1016-github-drinkup-in-grand-rapids). WebDev folks of all stripes will be there.

Comments

Sounds great!

postuma's picture

Sounds great!

Reminder!

pichot's picture

Just a reminder to everyone that this month we have a pretty awesome topic and guest speaker. I hope to see all of you there!

Great. Thanks for getting

royerd's picture

Great. Thanks for getting this set up!

Dan

My last GRupal meetup!

dennetmint's picture

Geolocation, GitHub drinkup with delicious munchies from Stella's...

See you there! :)

Thanks again for having me

Brandonian's picture

Thanks again for having me over and letting me present on mapping in Drupal! The link for the presentation & slides is http://brandonmorrison.com/presentation/geospatial-drupal.

If you have any followup questions/comments, you can find me on Drupal.org as Brandonian, or on irc. I hang out in the usual Drupal related ones, along with #drupal-geo with the rest of the geo nerds.

Missed it, but a question...

postuma's picture

Brandon,

I'm so bummed that I had to miss it. But since you've invited questions, I'm wondering...

If we geocode and geotag a news story, for example, I understand that coordinates are assigned to it. But what about text for city, state/prov, country, region, continent - can the node be auto-tagged with those as well?

The reason I ask is because, in addition to plotting the news story on a map, I'd like to enable people to click to "See all stories from Nigeria", for example. Can the geolookup process assign geo-coordinates AS WELL AS their city/state/country text equivalent?

Excellent question! By

Brandonian's picture

Excellent question! By default, the Geocoder module will geocode on the most accurate point available, so if you only provide "Grand Rapids, MI", the Geofield will only save a point at the center of the city. You're not going to have multiple points available unless you specifically create multiple fields to hold that data in, which is probably a bad idea in the first place.

That being said, I can think of a couple of ways to solve your use case. If you're using Addressfield (http://drupal.org/project/addressfield) as your data store for your news stories, you could probably write views to filter based on city, state, etc, bypassing the need for geocoding entirely. Another would be to do proximity searches (i.e., I want to know stories that have happened x miles away from this address/point/etc.). There's the start of a proximity search module (http://drupal.org/sandbox/jpstrikesback/1367194) which is supposed to have pretty decent Geofield support. FYI, We're looking to do a basic version of what they have in Geofield proper.

Grand Rapids, MI

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