Thread: lets discuss development of regional search/data

lets discuss development of regional search/data

OK, to kick it off we had this request by BigMac
BigMac wrote:
David, I'm sending you a PM. I just purchased your software and love everything about it. However, before you finish version 3.0 can you PLEASE add an option to have states and cities included in the next version. Similar to craigslist, I want my visitors or members to have an option to search my website via the state or city they live in. Example, Search By City or Search By State. Or, Select A City or Select A State.

Of course this request is not new to many of us but have we actually 'sat' down and thought about it?


First we need a list of cities/provinces/states/countries etc.
here is my first find.
http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/

Maybe Google has an exportable list?

How about this for an Idea...
As a user enters a city/state/whathaveyou it is saved in a database/xml. As that database grows those cities are made available. As they are made available a page is automatically generated and added to a "regional" search function. One click on "Alabama" will bring up all the cities that have an entry. If the city is not listed it does not have an entry.

I think that's understandable.
Any thoughts?

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

Database of provinces and cities $30
http://www.scrapingweb.com/databases/ca ... abase.html

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

groan, thanks for taking up this issue. In the next few days I'm going to find possible ways to already include state and city search into the next version of ClassiPress. I'll PM David some possible solutions to this issue that everyone wants.

Thanks for all of your help.

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

I'm sorry but I had sorted up this issue too for my site when I solved the image edit option earlier. Its very easy to implement. I modified a plugin to actaully create the categories ie states, cities etc.... And then justa very small mod in the post ad form allows you to place ads for specific cities. However the design was specifically for my site but then I could let David on how to easily implement the same in any classipress. It would save me hacking every clasipress in future

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

Hi - what is the URL of your site?

I would like to see this in action if possible....

Cheers,

Paul

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

Ya, Ditto.
Maybe you can post a snippit of what you did?

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

Actually I haven't yet implemented it live. I have been waiting for classipress for the better part of last year so that I could make my site go live. So actually its still running locally but its working. Le me see since classipress is getting delayed by another month I might go live this month. And let me see if I contribute the same to the community like the image edit option. Right now its a hack of an existing plugin and some other steps that needs to be done manually for the whole thing to be working.

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

Sounds good - or even if you could just provide screen captures so we can get an idea then there is no worry of you having to Go Live

Cheers,

Paul

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

Those are all great ideas and due to this sort of feedback (and the product survey I sent out several months ago), I have incorporated it into 3.0. Country and state will be included in the new ad form and will also have a search by country/state.

As much as I'd like to have a city drop down field, there are just so darn many of them and the list would be huge. For example, the list from Maxmind that 'groan' mentioned above is 31MB zipped! Yes that could be put into a database but even that would be huge and more so, I need to keep text like that in flat files so it can be easily translated for other languages. There will instead be a text field where people can type in their city.

Below is a screenshot of what the prototype looks like. So when you select a country, the state drop down will dynamically populate (via javascript) with the corresponding country states.

[attachment=0:lctw57e2]PIC20033261739307927[1].gif[/attachment:lctw57e2]

Re: lets discuss development of regional search/data

David,

I take it that these country and state fields will be custom fields right and not going to be categories. Can this be switched off??