Call to the Lazyweb: PHP programming

I’m nearly finished with a rather radical overhaul of the Map of Human Sexuality, and one of the things I thought would be cool to do with it would be to make it interactive.

What I’d like to be able to do is to place it on a Web page, then allow folks to stick push pins in it by clicking or dragging on it. Ideally, folks could also, if they wanted, save it with a name/password, and be able to link to their version of it.

What I have: PHP, Perl (though I’d prefer PHP), mySQL. I know there must already be code floating around out there somewhere that does the heavy lifting (records mouse clicks, places a graphic of a pin over another graphic, saves the array of pin locations in a database), so it’s be pretty silly to code it all from scratch. Plus, y’know, I’m not sure my PHP chops are up to it.

But I’m not finding anything.

Anyone know of any open source code or libraries that might be useful?

44 thoughts on “Call to the Lazyweb: PHP programming

  1. Sadly, as it turns out, my desired use violates the Google API Terms of Use, which forbid “adult” content or using the API on sites which host “adult” content.

    So it looks like rolling my own is likely to be the only way to go.

  2. The downside is that the ColdFusion tag is a wrapper for the Google Maps API, and the API Terms of Use forbid using it in an adult-related context. 🙁

  3. Yep. Which rules out using PHP to wrap the Google Maps API too.

    What I need is code or a set of libraries to do this that doesn’t make use fo the Google Maps API and isn’t encumbered by any use restrictions at all. I know such code exists, there are many Web sites that have some variant of “click on a graphic to change it” going on. I’d prefer not to re-invent the wheel if I don’t need to, y’know?

    I could do it in Flash, but I really would rather not go down that road.

  4. The Pragmatic Programmer’s guide to AJAX uses (as its first example) a how-to on building your own Google-maps alike. I grok that Google’s TOS doesn’t allow for use of Google’s stuff f’real, but rolling your own (or downloading the example from the Pragmatic Programmer’s example site) might work for you.

    🙂

  5. The Pragmatic Programmer’s guide to AJAX uses (as its first example) a how-to on building your own Google-maps alike. I grok that Google’s TOS doesn’t allow for use of Google’s stuff f’real, but rolling your own (or downloading the example from the Pragmatic Programmer’s example site) might work for you.

    🙂

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