A location-/proximity-selector widget could make a greatly improved frontend for the location-module.
The idea is to have a simpler yet more powerfull interface, by first having just a zip/city-autocomplete field, which loads matching places in a dropdown-select via Ajax. If a user/application needs to enter a full adress, this could by done via a simple form (as of now), which is shown as a popup (when a the "enter adress" button is clicked).
Third, another popup could provide a gmap-module integrated google map selector for precisely clicking a geo-position without filling out a whole adress form.

This way, users could enter geo locations according to the respective needs with a much leaner interface, by:

- simply entering their zip or city-name (loading a dropdown-select with matches via ajax) - when geocoding is possible
- entering their full adress, if they prefer (or if needed) - via a adress-form-popup
- simply clicking their geo-position via a gmap-popup widget, if suitable

Wouldn't that be a great improvement in usability?!?

Any further ideas or needs for that?
Any ongoing development or hints how to code this in the location-module?

Comments

obslogic@groups.drupal.org’s picture

obslogic@groups.drupal.org commented

I think this would be great feature...

I'd be interested in working with someone on something along these lines...

It would be particularly useful for the UK where we can only locate to rough areas with the post/zip-code, and then want to be able to offer people to tweak the location to be more accurate... In fact... if we could then record people's corrections for the exact location of a post-code, we could possibly input them back into the FreeThePostcode project in the UK which is trying to create a user-generated licence free postcode-location database....

I'll have a look tomorrow at how big a project this might be and will post further thoughts if I can....

geodaniel’s picture

geodaniel commented

I'd certainly add a +1 for any simplification of the location input. Did either of you start trying to implement anything here?

TimDavies’s picture

TimDavies commented

I've not started anything yet... (and not all that likely to in the short-term as I've not touched AJAX in drupal yet... although if I can help at all in redeveloping the geonames look-up to help with this then I'd be happy to...)

nicolash’s picture

nicolash commented

+1

The current location form was too simplistic for our uses, so as a workaround I had to create a CCK form with autocomplete nodereference field to suburbs and later save the data programatically into the location table (and an extended location table). This works for now, but it would be great to have more options to tailor the input form out of the box.

Can somebody point me to resources about autocomplete fields?

jamesJonas’s picture

jamesJonas commented

subscribing

bcn’s picture

bcn commented

tracking...

catch’s picture

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http://drupal.org/node/217512