Thread: Searching By Postcode

Searching By Postcode

Hi, Vanage is exactly what i have been looking for. Its a beautiful theme, easy to use, exactly what i need for the site i want to create however i am from the UK and the aim of my site is to search for restaurants in the surrounding area by postcode.......

Would vantage let me do this?

So for example a user types a postcode in the search bar such as 'N8 7RW' and vantage displays the listings in proximity to that postcode?

Kind Regards

MIKE

Hi Mike, thanks for your feedback :) You can search a post code in the "Near" field and you'll see when the results are found, that you can also refine the search further, which would enable you to extend the distance from the initial search location. The example of this advanced search can be see on the Vantage demo.Thanks.

I see that shows how it would work with American Zip Codes but could you provide an example of it working with UK Postcodes?

I have bought software before that says it is compatible with postcodes just like it is with ZIP codes but it did not work correctly.

Sorry to be annoying but i would really like to see a working UK Postcode example

Thanks

Unfortunately I can't change the setting of the actual AppThemes demo as this effects all visitors to the site, but I have created a bunch of UK test listings on my own personal test site and set to the UK in order to complete the search. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to post my URL, but have provided a screenshot below of the results.

A search using the full code "N8 7RW" doesn't give the results, however "N8" does. This may be because of the space in the post code, so I'm just checking with our team if this is something to do with the Google maps API. I will update asap.

Brilliant, Yes i can see it does work via the screenshot using the first part of the postcode. It will need to work with a full postcode because people in the UK always search there full postcode and not part of it.

If you can get the full postcode working (even if it means i have to do some slight code change on my version of Vantage when purchased) then i will buy the theme right away!

Any update on this?

I really want to buy this theme but need this confirmed first.......

Mike99, I can confirm that the location search works when searching with the outward part of the postcode but not the entire postcode. UK postalcodes is an issue that will be addressed. This is an issue with the Google Maps API. We just need to find a way to work around the issue.

I'd like to say we have a definite timetable for when a fix could be expected, but I'm afraid we don't. I've just spoken to a couple of the developers and I know we will be continuing to discuss how to fix it in the coming week.

Cheers!

Thats a real shame, because technically that makes the search almost useless for UK users.

The problem being the first part of a UK postcode is simply the area and the second part the more specific location in that area. So if a user searches their London postcode for example then the results will not be whats near to him at all, in fact it would just be a list of London results. As you can imagine this is useless for the user because the results will be random and they cannot see whats nearest to their location at all.

The following Wordpress plugin actually works for the whole postcode;

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...-your-nearest/

The dev made it a while ago and has not updated it since but it does work with the full postcode, maybe this could be useful to you in fixing Vantages issue?

I really want to buy this theme and its perfect but for UK users the postcode not working is a massive flaw.

Thanks for letting us know about the plugin. We'll have to check it out and see how they do it. UK postalcodes is a sticky problem with the Google maps API. There are ways to make it happen but the solutions frequently have performance issues. With a site that has thousands of business listings, we want the location search to work well for all countries without sacrificing performance. As mentioned before, it's an issue that we will be tackling.

While I can understand how important this would be for you, I couldn't promise that we could make a change very soon. We'd love for you to purchase the theme, but we also want you to be happy with the purchase. If you decide to pass for now, please consider checking back again as I'm sure we'll have this fixed at a later date.

Thanks.

Im thinking of purchasing and then possibly getting someone to make the relevant changes to my version of Vantgage. If i do this i will let you know how the finished site comes out :)