Its been awhile since I have last posted, but just wanted to drop an update in on what I have been working on lately. I’ve turned down the freelance and have been working on my own projects; my latest project is a wordpress plugin for geocoding. I searched high and low on Google for a wordpress plugin which would take an address, geocode it and return the long/lat.

Dont’ get me wrong, Ive found many, many great geocoding plugins but most of them store the data in an extra table and/or have functions setup to display maps, etc. I dont need all those bells and whistles, just a cut and dry solution. Once the values have been stored in WordPress as custom fields, I will be able to grab the values and display single maps and/or maps with each location plotted!

I have a few requirements:

• Need to grab data from Custom Fields and store returned values in Custom Fields
• Use the Google Maps Geocoding Service (just a personal preference)
• If a value already exists, the plugin will not proceed with Geocoding – the free version of Google Maps Geocoding is limited to 10k requests a day. I dont think I would hit that, but no use in wasting API calls.

The requirements are simple and I have already got the first bit working, which grabs my custom field “address” and sends a request to Google Maps geocoder method and returns a long/lat which are then stored back into WP as custom fields! Perfect!

I’m currently working on adding a custom administration panel, which will allow me/you to:

• Set a google maps API key (required)
• Set the custom field names that you wish to use to store long/lat values
• Choose custom field where the address value is stored

I’m hoping to finish this project in a few weeks and will post my plugin shortly thereafter! I hope its a winner and other people find it useful.

Jake Rutter