Fantastic to see the Geo module finally starting to take off!
In my experience, Drupal projects often want to capture geographic point data which relates to a textual form of that point. I will use the example of a favourite camping site. The address may be something like:
123 High Rd,
Green Mountain,
QLD, Australia
That could be captured in a CCK textfield no probs. Now, we can use the geocoder module to autopopulate a Geo CCK field with WKT data when the node is saved. However, this presents two problems:
1) the user must save the node in order to see whether the field was successfully geocoded.
2) if we're showing a marker on a map, we'd much rather show the actual camping spot, rather than the address entered above (which in this case is probably the car park). Let's say we had to walk 4 km off the road to get to "the lake where we camped".
I think both 1 and 2 could be solved by extending the gmap addons module's gmap_geo module. This module provides a google map front-end to a geo CCK field. Seems to work almost ok. However, it would be much better if it could:
1) provide a config option tying it to an existing CCK Geo or text field, from which it would set a marker by default. This would need to be jQuery on-blur on the chosen CCK field I guess, requiring an ajax call to the gmap geocoding code.
2) still allow the user to drag the marker to a slightly different location in order to finetune it (in my example, drag the marker from the car park where it would appear by default based on the address CCK textfield, and drag it to "the lake where we camped")
Even if the marker did need to reflect the CCK address textfield exactly, the above functionality would enable the user to see that their address was successfully geocoded, without having to save the node first.
What do people think of this? Is there sufficient interest in the idea for this to become an optional feature of the current gmap_geo module? If not, should it be a second module altogether? Would anyone else throw in a couple hundred $ with me to get this done?
Jeff