Cool Idea for a Module using Google Maps

[Ronin]

Now that Google has released their Google Maps API there are tons of mapping apps being built. I noticed that Mambo already has Google Maps capability.

What would be cool is if we could have a members only module that when visited Gives you a Google Map of the world and asks you to zoom in to your location and place a marker on the map for yourself. When the map is clicked, a marker would be placed for your username. This would reduce bogus map markers as each member would only get 1 marker. If a person clicked on the map marker it could simply link to that members profile.

For admin options, you could select what the maps centre and scale is (also using Google maps maybe), so you could start the map zoomed in on a specific area of the world if your site isn't worldwide. I believe you can also tweak the zoom bar, modify the markers and various other settings.

What do you folks think? I came across several that are hosted on a remote server but they don't hook into our site's existing member info. There's an existing GuestMap that uses google maps, php and SQL to do a lot of what I mention above so much of the work has already been done before. It just needs someone that knows Dragonfly really well to inegrate it.

[RottGutt]

I cannot get the GuestMap page to load, but the whole idea sounds really cool. I would definitely use it if it was ported to Dragonfly!

[mc__]

the allegro.cc forums / website portal (which is a custom job... a pretty god one too!) has this, and it is quite cool. This is a good idea.

I think that it should be added to the user table, and maybe to the forums viewtopic.php and associated template file to have the Location: actualery be clickable... and in their profile when they are asked to write it they can also click a link opening up a popup or somethign allowing them to click where they are... making their location: title become a hyper link to thier location in google maps.

sounds cool?

[tuta]

all sound good to me -- guess we need to try and trick someone into sitting down and taking a look at it!

[noobdesigner]

sounds like something good for DFbounty

[Ronin]

tuta wrote:

all sound good to me -- guess we need to try and trick someone into sitting down and taking a look at it!

Ahhh there's the rub.......

[tuta]

well -- I am not that good, but I might try to play around with it a little bit... at least until someone really good gets their interest piqued

[Ronin]

I manually added the guestmap I linked to above by adding it in as an Iframe in the content module. Had to manually enter at least one entry in the DB table for it to work. After I've added a marker I can't see some of the fields that it asks you to enter: website, email etc.

My "impression" is that it wouldn't take much to integrate it vs. starting a module from scratch.

[RottGutt]

The GuestMap keeps erroring out whenever I try to go to it. It starts to d/l, and I see the map pic, but then I get an "operation aborted" error message and the page goes blank. Is it just me?

[xfsunoles]

RottGutt wrote:

The GuestMap keeps erroring out whenever I try to go to it. It starts to d/l, and I see the map pic, but then I get an "operation aborted" error message and the page goes blank. Is it just me?

you use Internet Explorer 6?

[Ronin]

RottGutt wrote:

The GuestMap keeps erroring out whenever I try to go to it. It starts to d/l, and I see the map pic, but then I get an "operation aborted" error message and the page goes blank. Is it just me?

It's not just you. I used my "View in IE" plugin from Firefox to load it in IE and saw the same thing. I believe this code is used in several implementations and one of them had a changelog that reported the IE bug being fixed. If only I could find where I saw that...

EDIT: A google groups search found lots of hits on what the problem is and how to fix it.

[xfsunoles]

i got this problem before, i can fix it. that Javascript should be inside HEAD Tag. don't try to put this in DF Modules.

[Ronin]

Here's the page that talked about the IE bug being fixed.

[Ronin]

xfsunoles wrote:

don't try to put this in DF Modules.

Can you flesh this statement out a bit xfsunoles? Do you mean without fixing the JS location or something else?

Found another interesting implementation here.

And a great tutorial here.

[RottGutt]

Thanks for the info guys... I see the fix has to be made in the web page's code itself, so I won't get to see this thing in action unless it gets ported.