Friends/Members near me

[sooskriszta]

Drawn from ​http://mercime.github.io/buddyPress-2014-survey-results/feature-requests.html

One cool feature would be to be able to search for friends or members near me.

"Near me" shall be based on one of 2 criteria:

• My current address as available in my xprofile, esp. if I am accessing the site from a desktop
• My current GPS location, if I am accessing the site from a smartphone with GPS-enabled

[sooskriszta]

One way to think about it is to filter or sort directory by distance from me.

[boonebgorges]

I'm a bit on the fence about this.

On one hand, it's definitely a feature that would be useful to many sites. And the most basic parts would not be overwhelmingly difficult to build. And I have been frustrated in the past about the lack of really great BP location/mapping tools, to the extent that I've often thought of building some myself.

But it quickly gets very complicated, and for that reason I think that this feature needs to remain plugin territory.

• How is the data stored? In order to be useful (ie highly queryable) it would probably need its own database table, with columns for lat/long
• We'd likely need to use an external service for converting natural language locations ("10010", "NYC", "New York, NY, USA") to lat/long. Aside from Akismet, we generally try not to rely on external services in BP
• Likewise for the display of maps, which would be the next logical request
• I'd imagine we'd want to have some "fuzziness" operators, where one could enter one's general location, but not exact address (for privacy reasons)

So, the expertise and resources that'd be required to build and maintain this, along with the fact that we'd need to use external services, make me think that this is plugin territory. But let's move it to Future Release on the chance that we decide that there are some aspects we can comfortably absorb within BP itself.

[sooskriszta]

Replying to boonebgorges:

• We'd likely need to use an external service for converting natural language locations ("10010", "NYC", "New York, NY, USA") to lat/long.

True. Google Maps is pretty robust and reliable but still an external service.
​https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#geocoding

Replying to boonebgorges:

• I'd imagine we'd want to have some "fuzziness" operators, where one could enter one's general location, but not exact address (for privacy reasons)

This will probably connect with an address field type #5502 with granular privacy settings.

I think this is not an area we should worry about. Google Maps has a fairly sophisticated system which we can piggyback on (in case we decide to use Google Maps, that is)

[sooskriszta]

Plus, here're a few APIs for IP location:

• ​http://www.hostip.info/use.html
• ​http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php
• ​http://ip-api.com/docs/

And there's the ​Google recommended ​W3C approach.

[r-a-y]

There are too many dependencies for this to be a core option.

Proposing to close this.

[slaFFik]

Agree with @r-a-y and @boonebgorges.
Leaving a link to one of the possible solutions, that is already built: ​https://geomywp.com/extensions/category/buddypress/

[ninjew]

Leaving a link to one of the possible solutions, that is already built:
​https://geomywp.com/extensions/category/buddypress/

Thank you @slaFFik for sharing the link.

Indeed, BuddyPress members locator is a core feature built into the free GEO my WP plugin ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/geo-my-wp/. With GEO my WP you can create a members proximity search form that will allow users/visitors to search for BuddyPress members based on address, radius, xprofile fields and more.

And as @boonebgorges pointed above:

• How is the data stored? In order to be useful (ie highly queryable) it would probably need its own database table, with columns for lat/long

• We'd likely need to use an external service for converting natural language locations ("10010", "NYC", "New York, NY, USA") to lat/long. Aside from Akismet, we generally try not to rely on external services in BP

GEO my WP uses Google Maps API to geocode address and to display the members on the map. It also saves the location data ( address, lat, long... ) in a custom table in database for more efficient queries.