By maritzaj on

Hey Everyone!

I just finished my first drupal site. It's a directory of airport parking facilities in the US that features a google maps mash-up.

Check it out: http://aboutairportparking.com/

I just launched it, so feedback would be greatly appreciated :)

- Maritza

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

Great site. Could you talk about what modules you used, anything custom in there? Are the selectors to select state and airport from views module? category module?

maritzaj’s picture

maritzaj commented

I wish I could say that I made better use of pre-existing modules, but for the most part I wrote my own. The only module I really used was the gmap module.

I wrote my own modules for the search part, and listing the faciliites/airports. The selectors for search are just values pulled from the database that I threw into a form using the forms api.

This might be kinda vague, let me know if you have any specific questions.
Thanks for checking it out :)

sami_k’s picture

sami_k commented

What exactly is the use case for your service?

--
showcase | blog | rob's book

green monkey’s picture

green monkey commented

oh my gosh, my sites are suppose to have a purpose too? .. I have enough brain work just creating something and getting it looking porfessional .... let alone provide a useful purpose.

grrrrr ... this is really going to slow me down :D

maritzaj’s picture

maritzaj commented

I thought people looking for airport parking would find the site useful. There aren't that many sites dedicated to providing this information in one place, and incorporating the google map seemed to add a nice touch.

The idea is just that people would be lead to the site if they're looking for airport parking, and they'd have access to information about a number of facilities in one place.

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

I think it is great. Where did you get the data and the access to the up to date info.? Seriously, I think it's a brilliant service and you might have some travel sites knocking on your door soon.

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

Yeah, I also wondered what Sami was driving at;-)

I personally think it is an excellent concept and have already recommended the site to my relatives in the U.S.

johnchalekson’s picture

johnchalekson commented

pretty cool.
did you get all of this information about the 400 parking lots yourself? how did you obtain this information.

John

---------------
projects working on currently: http://www.pagecharts.com - http://www.alexacharts.com - http://www.4pir2.org - http://www.americanlocalnews.com - http://www.hedgedfund.com - http://www.thingstoday.com -

maritzaj’s picture

maritzaj commented

The data was mostly just pulled from the internet by a co-worker, which is why the site is limited to major airports, and about 400 parking facilities. I'm hoping facility owners and users will make use of the link on the homepage to add a facility to increase the size of the database.

Thanks for the positive feedback :)

green monkey’s picture

green monkey commented

I had a few minutes to try your site out tonight.

Well done, very well done - I liked the super clean and direct approach.

I only found one weak spot. The weak spot wasn't on your side of the fence, it was with Google --- I suspect.

I did two quick spot checks using the directions link you provide.

1st check: Google seemed to know the street address, however it displayed a National Map and I was unable to drill down.

2nd check: Google did not know the address. So, drill down not an optioon.

Like I said, I only checked two parking sites. My local ones, something I could verify.

The only other problem I can think of, would be a long term one. Keeping prices up-to-date.

I'm thinking you must of located a printed booklet with pricing and locations to use for your data.

maritzaj’s picture

maritzaj commented

I guess I'll have to take a look at more of the 'get directions' links, the ones I checked out seemed to work - thanks for clicking around and noticing the problem.

green monkey’s picture

green monkey commented

no problem, I seem to have a nack for finding bugs

the town was Spokane, WA

zywieco’s picture

zywieco commented

Great implementation of Google Maps. Congrats!

How do you handle the reviewing of proposed corrections by anonymous users? ex. at http://www.aboutairportparking.com/edit-facility?n=200&submit=n
Does this data get emailed to you, do you use some sort of Workflow handling, or do you have another way of handling this?
On top of that, the data in the correction form (is this a Webform?) is prepopulated. Did you use a module for this?

jchuck5612’s picture

jchuck5612 commented

Love the site! It looks professional, clean, easy to use, and it gives you exactly what you're looking for:)

I was wondering if you could help me figure out how a.) you created the node list and corresponding map with nodes and b.) how you got the hover over a node link and pan the map to the node to work?

I'm working on a paddlesport website that this would be killer on but I've been struggling with the javascript and the gmap module.

Thanks and great stuff!
JC

patcon’s picture

patcon commented

Wow! This is great! Any reason why the addition of new lots isn't more of a workflow? I would imagine each lot is a node -- correct? I'm just not sure I understand why you simply have a standard contact form for submission of new ones. Couldn't you have THEM fill out all the info, and then just approve it? But maybe there's something I'm missing :)

Anyhow, would you see the framework for this site as packageable? As in, could it be a distribution of sorts? It seems that many organizations could find immense use in this as a simple solution (assuming submission of points is possible). For example, I know of an organization in my city that collects information on fruit trees. Often, this perfectly good food simply falls on the ground and is wasted, but this group is trying to put it to good use. Currently, they visit the sites of submitted trees, and pick them clean before they fall and spoil -- 1/3 goes to volunteers, 1/3 to homeowner, and 1/3 to local shelters. It's a great program!
http://www.notfarfromthetree.org/

Anyhow, they're looking to make it simpler and more open for ANYONE to come pick from these trees (with the owner's blessing, I assume). There're looking to do something like this other group did with fig tree mapping in Bristol:
http://cca-actions.org/actions/website-collects-figs

Anyhow, tangential, but just thought I'd share how your project could really help other community initiatives :)

badasskitty’s picture

badasskitty commented

Hi there,

After checking out your site I was blown away by it. The interface would be exactly what I would need for my project. I would like to make a similar "localized bookmarker" site but instead of mapping useful information about parkings at airports it would be for useful localisation of resources and locations and statistics on Eve Online (MMORG game). For instance it would let gamers search for bountyful moons or planets and share this information for a richer game experience. It would be totally awesome if you could share your site as a "Installation profile" to the Drupal Community or maybe post a tutorial on how you made it.

Please consider this because you would help out a lot of people that can't even decide which modules to use to start, like myself.

Greetings,

alex

mcabalaji’s picture

mcabalaji commented

Hi all,

The Panning in Gmap on hover is pretty easy . You can use the below code to Pan Gmap on and call this function from your node title onmouseover

function show_on_map(lat,lon,count,html) {
var m = Drupal.gmap.getMap('gmap-auto1map-gmap0'); // view_gmap is my id, change it to whatever your map id is called
m.vars.latitude = lat;
m.vars.longitude = lon;
m.vars.zoom = 5; // this can be anything from 0 to 17
// count is id of marker, html comes encoded thanks to htmlentities function
m.vars.markers[count].marker.openInfoWindow(html);
m.change('move',-1);
}

You can also refer this link : http://marcgrabanski.com/article/jquery-google-maps-tutorial-basics. Hope this helps

ron_sparks’s picture

ron_sparks commented

Hey Nice work! I am new to Drupal, and have a background in front end and UX designer but I am hooked on drupal now.

So I have been looking trying to find site that look good and have great function via drupal, and well you sir have done some nice work.

May have to come back and take a deeper look but like what I see.