To Anybody it may concern,
I am slowly starting to collate the information needed to implement this module for the Ireland.

If there are any other people who need this or are working on it, let me know.
We could of course pool our efforts.
Progress will be slow, but I need this, so I will get there.

Some peculiar issuess in relation to Ireland.

1. No Postal codes.
No Honest, there aren't any. I'm going to make them up, based on Car Registation codes. I'll have to use some creativity for various reasons.

2. All-Ireland Support.
I have made a decision to cover the whole of Ireland as one region, as the website I have in mind will cover all of the Island.
I could implement Northern Ireland as a seperate country, maybe.
Any suggestions from others who may be in the same position.

So There you go.
Where did the details for the original location.ie.inc come from?
Some interesting codes used for the Irish counties, I've never seen them before!

Regards
Alan

Comments

ankur’s picture

ankur commented

Geez. You're right. I had to confirm it for myself, but Ireland does not plan on implementing a postcode system until the year 2008. Very unsweet.

However, we're trying to change some things in location module so that it depends less on postal codes for tagging a node with a lat/lon. The interface includes something that allows you to apply your own lat/lon for a node. Also, however, it would be nice to grab a dataset that we can use to try to assign an approximate lat/lon for some kind of city/province or city/county combination.

My other concern is that I know recently the Irish goverment decided to switch all place names back to the original Irish-Gaelic names for them, but that many people (esp. tourists) still know them by their English names.

If you can bring me a dataset that maps city names to lat/lon (whether Gaelic or English... or both), I'll make the necessary modifications to location module and format the dataset in a way insertable into the location module tables. I'm wiling to put in extra time so people know where Bushmills County is! Yeah, since 1608, heh.

-Ankur

ankur’s picture

ankur commented

To add to the previous comment, you may want to contact 'Dublin Drupaller' (http://drupal.org/user/8625). He's done some localisation work and I believe he might be familiar with the location module.

ankur’s picture

ankur commented

http://handelaar.org/blog/2006/01/the-holy-grail-of-irish-mapping

alanburke’s picture

alanburke commented

Hey Ankur, I'm still around!

But I've been lazy and done very little so far.

I had come across John's blog posting and will definitely be looking at it again when I get going properly, whenever that happens!

handelaar’s picture

handelaar commented

And in fact I'm here and a module developer.

My Ireland thing is accurate to about 200m max. It's a nice hack, if I say so myself, but it's not something which we can ship in the module for legal TOS reasons.

A similar legal difficulty exists with the UK (which, like it or not, currently contains six counties on this island yet outside the country I live in). However, you very much *can* geocode UK -- including Northern Ireland -- postcodes to stunning precision by throwing them at Google Maps.

Basically, "underground" solutions exist, but until Yahoo! finishes incorporating the Whereonearth data they bought last Xmas, we can't distribute them as part of location.module.

alanburke’s picture

alanburke commented

So What to do?
I'm back again, and would like to get this going.
There are more experienced developers that I around here, so I would like their opinions.

Should I Implement Ireland as one country?
The Site I am working on will be focussed on the one island as a whole, so this makes sense to me in any case.

What about postcodes?
Does anybody have any information on when they might appear in Ireland.
Should I 'create' some?

Regards
Alan

alanburke’s picture

alanburke commented

WORKAROUND.
OK So the lack of postcodes, and the various oddities of the Irish Postal system will hold us back on getting full support.

But I have found a good workaround, that may be of use to someone, so here goes.

Ingredients:
Drupal 4.7, Location, Gmap, Gmap_location

Basically, install location, and enable location information gathering for whatever node type you need ['event' in my case].
Now install and configure Gmap module, and gmap_location.

With GMap location, is is possible to have a Gmap on a node creation page, that allows you to select the exact location [in so far as Google maps have coverage anyway] of you location.
This generates the lat/lon cordinate for your node, rather than using the lookup functions based on address that other, fully supported locations, can use.

With this, I can now generate a Gmap view of the nodes with location information.

So a long way to go yet, but having a way to get a lat/lon cordinate for a location is pretty useful, or at least better than nothing.

Regards
Alan

handelaar’s picture

handelaar commented

I don't think it's wise to include NI in Ireland, since it's already covered by UK postcodes.

(Does the UK location include file use Yahoo's web service reverse geocoder? It should.)

IMHO the 'correct' way to implement an all-Ireland locator would be to have both Ireland and Northern Ireland (the latter being a renamed version of the UK one). Accuracy above politics, would be my attitude.

alanburke’s picture

alanburke commented

Hi John,

You are of course right about not having an 'all Ireland' solution for location.

The Accuracy of the module and location is more important.
If I want an 'All Ireland' location.inc, then that should be just for my site, not for Drupal.org in general.

[Politics don't come into my site anyway. Its just that people both sides of the Border will hopefully be using it].

As you might have seen from my post earlier on Today, I came up with a workaround for my site that gets me my lat and lon coordinates for each node.
I have enabled both UK and Ireland as location countries, and set Ireland as default.
When selecting province [=county in Ireland, slightly confusing, I might ammed this with locale.module], all of the UK areas are there, which includes Northern Ireland.

I don't know about the Yahoo lookup thing. In some ways, I'm not concerned as it would only be of limited use to me for now anyway.

Regards
Alan

handelaar’s picture

handelaar commented

Alan, if you lob me a personal email I could send you my street-level map hack for Ireland, if you want to see it. Alternatively it was posted to Eirepreneur's OpenEir list a couple of months back.

bdragon’s picture

bdragon commented
Component: Code » Data update

Changing component to Data update.

yesct’s picture

yesct commented
Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

I dont think 4.x is being supported any more, I'll mark this as a duplicate of #175193: Zip code database out of date and then close it.

yesct’s picture

yesct commented
Status: Closed (duplicate) » Closed (fixed)