Geo WordPress Plugin - Add Map Choices to Your Posts

The Geo plugin lets you to attach GPS coordinates to any post you choose. With these coordinates in the post you then use the built in function to display a drop down menu allowing the reader to choose to display maps or other geographic data. You can look at this Geocaching post to see how it works.

Right now the following are built in to the plugin:

• Google Maps - Obvious
• TopoZone - Topographical map with X marking the spot
• Acme Mapper - a front-end for Terraserver, a large geographical database, with improvements
• GeoCache - Geocaches near the location
• GeoURL - GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory.
• SideBit - Another GeoURL site
• Degree Confluence Project - Documents the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world.
• FindU - weather, position, telemetry, and message data. The primary source of data is an amateur radio systems
• MapQuest - Another Map
• MapTech - Topographical map without the X mark

Not sure why Yahoo maps is not on here - but then again not sure why a couple of these are! You can go into the plugin code and delete the lines for the maps you do not want to show. A great feature would be if they were selectable from the admin/options menu.

The plugin can be set to automatically add appropriate meta tags to the head section of your blog containing the geographic information that can be used by other plugins. You can use put the coordinate information to other uses such as displaying a map on the blog page.

It also has functions to output the latitude and longitude as text, a function that will give the distance between two sets of coordinates, and a function that will return the placename of the coordinates from a mapping service (defaults to Google). I saw one website that as part of his header for his travel blog output the coordinates for the post and how far he was ‘home’.

I had to make a number of changes to make the 1.9 version work:

• function geo_urls()
  • Got rid of {$title} in googlemap because when $title was empty Google maps failed
• function geo_UrlPopNav()
  • Added if statement (that was in version 1.0) so that if there were no coordinates then the PopNav was not shown. Seems weird that this was removed.
  • Added geo_PopUpScript(); above $sites = geo_urls(); - otherwise popup never came up (again was in version 1.0)
  • Quoted some of the \n - in other words changed some of the ‘text \n moretest’ to ‘text ‘ . “\n” . ‘ more text’ otherwise they just showed up as regular text on the page.
• function update_post()
  • Added pingGeoUrl($id); (again was in version 1.0)
• function geo_urls()
  • I rearranged the geo_functions to the same order I have them listed above.