Posted by marcusx on October 7, 2010 at 1:22pm
Hello mapping Experts!
As far as I understand there are three major drupal projects about saving geodata. Location, Gmaps and OpenLayers. Is there a comparison of them anywhere?
At the moment I just need to store a lot of address data and don't want to use a plain text field because in the future it is very likely that the addresses are used for some geolocation stuff. At the moment I just wan't to display the address data in a view as plain text.
I need the easiest and most userfriendly method for some unexpierenced users to put in the address data (Street, ZIP-Code, City - nothing fancy like setting a marker on a map or something like that.)
What would you recommend?
Regards
Marcus
Comments
There is also Geo. I spent a
There is also Geo.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure them out and chose Openlayers.
Here is a tutorial I wrote for basic mapping points on a map.
http://www.drupaldoes.com/content/tutorial-openlayers-mapping-nodes-and-...
There is much other stuff. For instance, you can autocopy the address, city, state, zip, whatever, to a plain cck text field and present it however you like.
Not an expert but if you have any questions I can answer I will be happy to write up a tutorial of what I know.
Geo-modules
Check out zzolo's wiki that compares all the different geo modules: http://groups.drupal.org/node/89769
http://www.thomasturnbull.com
http://twitter.com/thomasturnbull
How about making ONE content
How about making ONE content type with cck fields for Street, ZIP-Code, City and also for latitude and longitude and make a couple of records and then import cvs-file and if you want the geocoding in your cvs file use Batch geocoding http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=batch+geocode before you use module import.
And now you can make views of what data you want to show and if you want a google map you can followe my explanation http://groups.drupal.org/node/94184 especially the last post where I don't use any module.
These http://www.tinemuller.dk/new_new_test_drupal/node/1395 and http://www.tinemuller.dk/new_new_test_drupal/node/1394 is made like this and in the top of the site the links after CRUD is made with views. All my maps is made without map modules because I still haven't found any that could make what I want and I'm not clever enough to make one myself yet.
Works great
Thanks for the suggestions. Open Layers works really much smoother than the other mapping stuff I tried. But I have already another problem :-) Maybe you can have also a look on this post: http://groups.drupal.org/node/98759
I just created a site using
I just created a site using OpenLayers: http://bandcycle.com where the site draws the map as each post is created.
The OpenLayers Geocoder module - http://groups.drupal.org/node/36648 - combines a text field with a map. The text field offers suggestions from Google data and the map adjusts to the new location. Then, you can even drag the marker to adjust the exact coordinates. I haven't heard any complaints!
I chose OpenLayers because it wouldn't have the silly Google logo in the corner, because it's opensource community-driven, and it offered the right features. There is a lot of configuration involved for the OpenLayers module, however, but once you get the hang of things, it's really cool. Also, I created a custom map overlay, custom tooltip behavior and some views to display the data. Thank God for Google. I'll be using it for my next project as well. I'd be happy to help if you have specific questions.