I’m working now on google maps, I’m trying to build something not even half as extensive but something on the lines of http://wikimapia.org/. Ok I’m not going to be building the whole app haven’t got that much time on my hands. However the application I’m working on has users signing up and they would be able to pin point and create locations on a google map which would be stored in my back-end database.
Plus there would be a search option whereby a user could search for a specific place and all list of matching entries would be displayed as an ‘overlay’ to the map and all places would be highlighted on the map.
Also if you’ve noticed how wikimapia works – you can add a place by virtually clicking and dragging on the map itself as opposed to adding in coordinates on some complicated form and the search is embedded within the map and not outside.
Now I have an idea of integrating basic google maps – no biggie there but this is not just a simple integration procedure. Does anyone have any idea what I need to do here.
I’m working on Php and using JQuery for javascripting.
Thanks for the response – however my query was different in this respect that my application is such that we would have users signing up and they would come and pint point and create new locations on the map so basically its not one user – all the coordinates would be entered by the users in a ‘click your place on the map’ kind of way and we would like to be able to overlay all those details upon the map as well as categorise like lets say – show all places on the map where theres a birthday party, or show all internet cafes on the map – i.e. all these details are entered by users.
Maybe I’m missing something here – but I’m looking to make a simplified watered down version of wikimapia here.
If you want to integrate with Google Maps, I think the best place to get started is the source: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/, specifically the documentation and API reference. Get yourself a key, drop one of the examples into your page and start tweaking.
For your points, you’ll basically store coordinate information (lat/long), plus whatever information you want to display. You can even have custom map tiles (the pictures of the world), or custom map overlay tiles (transparent additions to the displayed world). It really is a quite flexible API for mapping things.
When you run into a specific issue, ask.