By Rob_Feature on

Hello...
I have a site which features artists and their work. On this site, people need to be able to search by the artist's location (city and state). Obviously, I'm going to use taxonomy to do this.

When an artist signs up for a user account, they will select their city and state. Setting up the state taxonomy is not a problem. However, it's impossible to enter in all the possible cities in the US.

So, I need a way for a user to be able to create a Taxonomy term (their city) if it's not already in the list...I realize this is dangerous, but I don't see another way to do it.

Is there a module that handles something like this (including some checks and balances)?

If not, please let me know how you would handle this and any pitfalls you see. Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

doka’s picture

doka commented

As you set up a vocabulary, you might want to tick the freetagging checkbox, allowing users to define terms in the vocabulary. After a while, you can consolidate these terms.

Doka

Doka

Rob_Feature’s picture

Rob_Feature commented

Hey Doka...
This was my first idea as well...the issue with this, in my mind, is duplications of cities because of mis-spellings or other issues. How would you handle these duplications?

/**
  * Bob Christenson
  * Mustardseed Media
  * http://mustardseedmedia.com
  */
vm’s picture

vm commented

you can get a CSV (Comma Seperated Value) List of most everything on the internet. search using google for CSV of US cities once located and downloaded you can import them into your database.

Rob_Feature’s picture

Rob_Feature commented

I like this idea alot. My concern would be the zillion cities that it would import.

Can you give some directions on how I could find a list like this? (I'd love to have it for cities over a certain population so it's not so many). Any help on that?

Thanks for this great piece of info....

/**
  * Bob Christenson
  * Mustardseed Media
  * http://mustardseedmedia.com
  */
test127’s picture

test127 commented

I think the the "list of all cities" idea is probably the best... or at least it will require the least maintenance once it's set up. I found a list at http://www.city-data.com/, but it's not in a ready-to-use format. You'd probably want to use a script to download all the data, strip away the "useless" information, and insert the state and city names into your database. Or, you might ask them if they have (or could prepare for a fee) a list in a format that you could use.

If you don't want to do it that way and you can't do it with taxonomy_access or tac_lite then maybe you should look into whether you can do it with organic groups.

I'm curious to see your solution so please post it (or at least about it).

laura s’s picture

laura s commented

Use the location module. It includes a 4MB script to insert every zip code in the country into the location database that it creates. Users and nodes can be tagged with locations this way. (This is not taxonomy, btw.)

Laura
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csc4’s picture

csc4 commented

I wanted to use location for a similar application - but I can't work out how to get location information on registration?

Rob_Feature’s picture

Rob_Feature commented

This is a good idea...but i don't see it as being very 'browsing friendly'....by this I mean: I want users to be able to browse by city name, not just search by zip code.

Can you incorporate city name into this too?

/**
  * Bob Christenson
  * Mustardseed Media
  * http://mustardseedmedia.com
  */
Rob_Feature’s picture

Rob_Feature commented

The more I think about this, the more I'm leaning towards Free Tagging the cities. A couple of reasons:

First, users are going to be browsing by cities. If I import a big list of cities, MOST of the cities that they would see and click on wouldn't have anyone in them. By using freetagging, I can insure than any city that a user sees will contain an artist.

Second, complexity: It seems that getting a CSV, importing it correctly as taxonomy terms, and then making it usable for people to enter their city may be overkill for this application. If I could narrow the city list to the top 20 in each state (population wise) I may consider that...but until then I think freetagging is the way to go.

The only downside I see is occasional maintenance by the site owner (but they do this full time, so it would just be a small weekly task). They would just have to check the city lists, make sure there's no duplicates, and update any that are there...should take all of 5 minutes until the site gets incredibly huge.

That's my plan...in case anyone cares :)

/**
  * Bob Christenson
  * Mustardseed Media
  * http://mustardseedmedia.com
  */