With online maps becoming so popular after Google Maps (not that people didn’t use them before, but it is my understanding everyone knows about them now), I had decided to put a “show map” link wherever an address is displayed in MagnaCRM.

So today I added this feature. These “show map” links, open in a new window, calling a specific php script and passing it all available address data (address, city, zip, region/state, country).

The problem is what to do with these fields. Although I created an easy way to define which service you want to use (by defining the url), which fields to pass and with what name, it’s still not working perfectly.

Google maps always locates a US address and almost always a UK one. Searches for other countries don’t behave well, even though satellite images exist for them. So searching for “address, athens, greece” shows nothing, while searching for “athens, greece” gets you a nice, detailed map of Athens. It would be nice if Google would try a little harder to at least guess the city or country.

Mapquest is better in this regard. If the address is unknown, it will ask you if you want the map of the city or country. On the other hand, Mapquest needs different fields for US maps and rest-of-the-world maps.

Anyway, the best results for non US / UK countries probably come from local mapping services. So I now have to implement country based service selection. I hope this gets better results for everyone, without having to change any settings.