[wp-hackers] Place, Geotagging

[Mike Schinkel]

Jennifer Hodgdon wrote:
>> In my opinion, geotagging is not appropriate for WP core. ... For that
reason, I don't think it's appropriate for the WP core, but it's great for a
plugin.

There would be real benefit for a defacto-standard method to emerge. WP has
enough market-share to start seeing that happen. 

>> Geotagging is quite complex, actually, and to do it right you need to
have the ability to enter information in various ways and have it end up as
a latitude/longitude pair. Which means having a geotagging database (for
converting addresses to lat/long), and probably having map clicking, etc. 

Then create a generic interface in core where a plugin can call a
proprietary service and return the information in a standard way to the core
and then have the core put the generic information into an HTML header.
That way people could create plugins for whichever service they prefer and
WP would still have one standard way to deliver the information.

BTW, it could be delivered a variety of ways concurrently: Lat/Long,
Country, Region within Country (i.e. State in the USA), City, Postal Code,
etc.

>> And regarding your first suggestion, I personally don't want my WP sites
to report anything to WP Central, such as automatically reporting where I'm
located or the existence of my site for some marketing listing on wp.org.

Something like this should, of course, be site owner-optional. No need to
imped progress for others because of a lack having personal interest. JMTCW,
anyway. :)

-Mike Schinkel 
http://mikeschinkel.com


-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com
[mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Jennifer
Hodgdon
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 2:11 PM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Place, Geotagging

There are plenty of plugins for geographical tagging in WordPress. If you
cannot find them in the official plugin repository, try Google (mine, for
instance, is not in the repository but on my web site).

In my opinion, geotagging is not appropriate for WP core. Geotagging is
quite complex, actually, and to do it right you need to have the ability to
enter information in various ways and have it end up as a latitude/longitude
pair. Which means having a geotagging database (for converting addresses to
lat/long), and probably having map clicking, etc. Generally, that means you
use an existing map service (Yahoo maps or Google maps), which is a
proprietary service, and requires the user to get an account for it to work,
and it could start charging at any time, change its API, etc. For that
reason, I don't think it's appropriate for the WP core, but it's great for a
plugin.

And regarding your first suggestion, I personally don't want my WP sites to
report anything to WP Central, such as automatically reporting where I'm
located or the existence of my site for some marketing listing on wp.org.

     --Jennifer

Steven Clift wrote [snipped for size]:
> 1. Place -  What do you think of having a standard way in WordPress to 
> assign [a geographical point for the site]? How about an automatic map 
> of [WP] sites or listings by hierarchical placename?
> 
> 2. GeoTagging - What do you think of defaulting or at least having the 
> ability to assign a point, bounded place, or "global" geo-tag in terms 
> of the general scope of individual content items created?

--
Jennifer Hodgdon * Poplar ProductivityWare www.poplarware.com

Drupal/WordPress Sites, Themes, Modules/Plugins Custom Web Programming, Web
Databases PHP, Perl, MySQL, JavaScript, XML, AJAX

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