Remove map url field from venues

I personally find the maps much more useful than longitude and latitude. Longitude and Latitude mean absolutely nothing to me. I would simply copy them to Google Maps to figure out where the coordinates point to. However, I do agree that there is no point in specifying both longitude, latitude, and a map url. Instead, the map url should be generated automatically using the coordinates (or the other way around, generate the coordinates from the map url).

Yup I think maps are what everyone is used to, longitude and latitude are handy if you are used to them or have an iphone!
So can we please just use a map instead

From a UI and usability perspective it would probably be the easiest to either paste in a Google Maps URL (and we get our data from it?) or you choose a position on Google map and we get lat. and long. from it.

Not sure how straight-forward that is to implement.

how about a field where you can copy and paste in the map so it's displayed. that way if folks want to use a google map they can, or if their area is mapped enough you can use an open street map, but both display easily once it's just a field to add and display the image?

How about using a service like Geohack (which wikipedia uses).

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millbank_Tower has a link at the top
"Coordinates: 51°29′32.0″N 0°07′33.5″W" which links to:-

http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Millbank_Tower&params=51_29_32.0_N_0_07_33.5_W_type:landmark_scale:3000

Which lets the user choose which mapping service to use.

If people can discover the Lat/Long of the location of their event (this is trival to do) then we could hold that in the database and generate the above geohack url to present a decent page to them?

oh I like that idea. +1

When we have longitude/latitude in the database, we can show a map with all venues for a given event (for example). i think long/lat are much more flexible than a map-url. I like the idea that a user can pick long/lat on a map.

Storing a map url is pointless my vote is for the longitude/latitude in the DB and choose to display it in what ever means you want.

You can even hack a single google map API to allow for easier entering of the co-ordinates :) similar to the way LP does it for peoples locations.

my 2cents

I have hacked a bit on this and I have used google maps to get long and latitude. I do not feel this is code we should merge for LD yet. Consider this proof of concept. https://code.launchpad.net/~effie-jayx/loco-directory/long-lat-picker-google-maps . I am willing to elaborate more, like having the pick set city and country acording to long and lat but first we should further discuss:

 * is google maps what we are using for our maps? learning the apis and doing this would mean duplication of efforts if someine else isworking with other maps.

 * Apart from the schema change, should this be picked up, forms for new venues would have to be more flexible than modelforms to be able to better place the map.

 * general cleanup of the map imports, currently there are imports for maps in many places. can we discuss where the maps apis of google are needed?

After hacking some more at suggestion of dholbach and toabctl, I have merged the openlayers branch with trunk, it is available at https://code.launchpad.net/~effie-jayx/loco-directory/toabctl_openlayer_merge, works like a charm. Questions 2 and 3 above still apply.