Google Maps only

[Dude]

After having messed for too long with countries, regions and cities, I ended up hiding all these fields, keeping only Address where users enter data that influence their Google Map

I would say that locations are probably the weakest feature of OSClass at the moment and I'm wondering if there wouldn't be a way to rely only on Google Maps and still be able to sort ads according to cities, regions, countries

Most of all, this would allow searches based on distances in the future

[_CONEJO]

Hi Dude,

I'm not sure what is the problem of the locations in Osclass, please, explain a little more. Anyway, we don't feel like relying exclusively on Google Maps (since after a number of requests, it's a paid service, also, some other services are more common in other countries -for example Yandex maps in Russia)

Thanks

[Dude]

These are the things I didn't like about the way OSClass handles locations:

- It should be possible to hide the Country drop-down menu if the website only targets a specific country (= set a country as default)
- It's too long to manually enter all the hundreds of missing villages names
- Regions and cities names for my country where not in the correct language
- In a way or another, the location should be requested upon register or right after it, otherwise people can think they have to enter their address every time they create an ad. Few of them may think about setting it up in their profile. Personnally, I've added a message below Address in item-post.php to recommend that they provide an address in their profile and I hide it if an address exists

A cool improvement would be to display a Google Map in item-post.php and, even better, refresh it as people type their address (à la Open Classifieds)

Altogether, I'm wondering if it would be possible to leave only the Address field in both item-post.php and user-profile.php and recover the Google Maps data to automatically insert Country, Region, City in OSClass db. There would be no risk that people enter places that don't exist, as the would see their location on the Google Map

[lucky_strike]

Because u  cannot rely on user input.. there is a shorter way zipcode or postal code  (keep your user anonimus)

[storlihoel]

I have the exact same problem with location.

My site is not based on country or region, so this is simply not relevant in my case.  It would be great if I could turn those off, and skale it down to a smaller community, say city area -> neighbourhood.  City area should be fixed, and neighbourhood filled in by user.  Is that doable? I've tried to script it myself, with no luck.

[lucky_strike]

Why reinventing the wheel?  Use the country field as it is city.. add your values in database just echo for the user city instead of country....cityarea instead of region.... add some hidden fields ( country always hidden rename region to city.....)

[storlihoel]

Sure, but it seems like Country is the minimum of what osclass needs. You got to have Country, or less it doesn't detect at all.

[lucky_strike]

make the fied invisible give a value 'us','gb'