Well I wrapped up the code on the way in this morning and this has been my first chance to throw it up with an explanation of what it does.

The DB sql is one table that i exported out of Microsoft SQL I have not tested this out in MYSQL but if someone would like me to explain just send feedback and I will type it up.

Things to know...

• There are four functions to add at the bottom blog.cfc
• Two admin pages that you can basically just throw up
• Two tags and a slight modification to the admin layout (justs adds "locations" to the menu)
• And the bit I'm not happy with the implementation on index.cfm which displays the map/s (sooo Sorry Ray) and if any one has a better way to do it i would love to know how to improve it (before my lead developer comes back from holidays would be tops!)
• You need to get an api key and add it to the applications scope (application.cfm) you get a Google Map Api key here for your Domain (ideally this would be in the blog.ini file in the future
• and the other thing.. there is no edit at the moment you can delete them though

Other than that just make sure you init your blog before adding any maps and you should be set to go.

Something to note, the two tag files are complete open-source as Lucas has released them before feel free to use and this is just one form of implementation with them.

If anyone has any worries let me know.

The code is the download button below.

I intend on using BlogCFC for my cricket blog which is happening in a few weeks, however for this to happen I needed google maps. We as a team of 11 spend most of our saturday driving round the northen beaches of Sydney trying to work out which the cricket ground we are playing on is.

So I decided on a train trip home to build a sort of plugin that would allow one or multiple google maps on a blog entry.

This is purely concept but as you can see from below works its built into the admin menu.

If there is anyone interested I would be more than willing to pack it up as an archive with a readme. However I admit I am young and bullet-proof and they way i have developed this around Ray's code my not be ideal soooo take it 'as is' and make it something tops for all to share.

This is where the redballoon office is!

Lucas found this and I have been meaning to post it all day (got carried away with the fish).

Was on the Google Maps API Blog

This is huge for us as a development team and we are researching numerous ways to integrate it into our current implementation of the google maps api on the GoDo Australia Site.

Stay Tuned also, thanks to the wonderfully long train trip we are developing a google maps plugin for BlogCFC.

Andy Jarret has pointed out that there is google maps on your mobile!

Ok, so it is not quite as cool as it could be, it does not have any GPS interface or such but it does give you road level maps on your phone for free!

These guys are just too cool!

One of the hardest things that we have had to tackle when we started to integrate mapping with GoDo was to get users to tell us where they were.

Not many people know their Latitude and Longitude, so we had to come up with a simple way that they could tell us where they were. We decided to turn the map itself into a form field so that users could just click on their location and it would write down their lat and lon for us.

We whipped up a nice little custom tag to handle it for us, It renders a map and three fields (lat, lon and map zoom) and fills in the fields based on where the user clicks on the map.

The tag hides away all of the javascript required to control the Google Map API

Once the custom tag is in your custom tag path (or imported via CFImport) you just give the control a name and pass in your google map key and you will get a basic map.

Click on the map and you now have a location.

Once we added an admin interface for our suppliers and staff to find godo experiences. We have got the ability now to provided a geographical search instead of a text based search.

The result when you click into a state for example GoDo NSW is a google map of the state and where all the experiences are. So now when you feel like heading up the hunter valley you can simply check out the local area and what experiences are around.

It has been a great project as a team to work on and Lucas sure has a few things to share in regards to his experience with the maps api.