Meta Box Geolocation

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Overview

The Meta Box Geolocation is helpful if you have multiple custom fields for location such as address, zipcode, city, state and country. Letting users manually fill in these fields might be a boring time-consuming job. This extension helps you fill in these information quickly by using Geocoding API from Google. So that you just need to enter an address, it will autosuggest a complete address and fill all other fields.

Take a look at the screenshot:

auto suggest geolocation data

For more information, please see the extension page.

Installation

Before installing the extension, you need to install Meta Box plugin first.

  1. Go to Plugins → Add New and search for Meta Box
  2. Click Install Now button to install the plugin
  3. After installing, click Activate Plugin to activate the plugin

The extension is just a WordPress plugin, you can install it like a normal WordPress plugin.

  1. Go to Plugins, click Add new, then click Upload plugin.
  2. Choose the .zip file you downloaded and click Install now
  3. After finishing upload, click Activate to finish.

Make sure you know how to create meta boxes and fields before continuing!

Enabling geolocation

To enable geolocation support for a meta box, add this line to your Meta Box (not field) settings:

'geo' => true

If you’re using Meta Box Builder, then please go to tab Settings and add a custom attribute for the geolocation as follows:

enable geolocation

You can also add options to Geolocation. Which can contains these properties:

  • An array of types specifies an explicit type or a type collection, as listed in the supported types below. If nothing is specified, all types are returned. In general, only a single type is allowed. The exception is that you can safely mix the geocode and establishment types, but note that this will have the same effect as specifying no types. The supported types are:
    • geocode instructs the Places service to return only geocoding results, rather than business results.
    • address instructs the Places service to return only geocoding results with a precise address.
    • establishment instructs the Places service to return only business results.
    • the (cities) type collection instructs the Places service to return results that match either locality or administrative_area3.
    • the (regions) type collection instructs the Places service to return any result matching the following types:
      • locality
      • sublocality
      • postal_code
      • country
      • administrative_area1
      • administrative_area2
  • bounds is a google.maps.LatLngBounds object specifying the area in which to search for places. The results are biased towards, but not restricted to, places contained within these bounds.
  • componentRestrictions can be used to restrict results to specific groups. Currently, you can use componentRestrictions to filter by country. The country must be passed as a two-character, ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 compatible country code.

For more information, visit Google Autocomplete Options

To add options, just pass an array of options to geo key instead of default 'geo' => true. For instance:

// Restrict the result in Australia only
'geo' => array(
    'componentRestrictions' => array(
        'country' => 'au'
    )
)

// Return only business results
'geo' => array(
    'types' => array( 'establishment' )
),

// Return only cities and business results
'geo' => array(
    'types' => array( '(cities)', 'establishment' )
),

Adding autocomplete field

To add an auto complete field. Simply add a text field and set it id starts with address. Like address or address_something… The plugin will treat that field as auto complete address field.

You can add auto complete to textarea, it works but will generate warning messages.

Populating field data

Address Components

When you selected an address from Auto-Complete field. It returns an array of Address Component Types. Which you can use it to populate to other fields. The following types are supported by Google:

Type Description  
street_address indicates a precise street address.  
route indicates a named route (such as “US 101”).  
intersection indicates a major intersection, usually of two major roads.  
political indicates a political entity. Usually, this type indicates a polygon of some civil administration.  
country indicates the national political entity and is typically the highest order type returned by the Geocoder.  
administrative_area_level_1 indicates a first-order civil entity below the country level. Within the United States, these administrative levels are states. Not all nations exhibit these administrative levels.  
administrative_area_level_2 indicates a second-order civil entity below the country level. Within the United States, these administrative levels are counties. Not all nations exhibit these administrative levels.  
administrative_area_level_3 indicates a third-order civil entity below the country level. This type indicates a minor civil division. Not all nations exhibit these administrative levels.  
administrative_area_level_4 indicates a fourth-order civil entity below the country level. This type indicates a minor civil division. Not all nations exhibit these administrative levels.  
administrative_area_level_5 indicates a fifth-order civil entity below the country level. This type indicates a minor civil division. Not all nations exhibit these administrative levels.  
colloquial_area indicates a commonly-used alternative name for the entity.  
locality indicates an incorporated city or town political entity.  
sublocality indicates a first-order civil entity below a locality. For some locations may receive one of the additional types: sublocality_level_1 through to sublocality_level_5. Each sublocality level is a civil entity. Larger numbers indicate a smaller geographic area.
neighborhood indicates a named neighborhood.  
premise indicates a named location, usually a building or collection of buildings with a common name  
subpremise indicates the first-order entity below a named location, usually a singular building within a collection of buildings with a common name.  
postal_code indicates a postal code as used to address postal mail within the country.  
natural_feature indicates a prominent natural feature.  
airport indicates an airport.  
park indicates a named park.  
post_box indicates a specific postal box.  
street_number indicates the precise street number.  
floor indicates the floor of a building address.  
room indicates the room of a building address.  
lat indicates latitude of the result  
lng indicates longitude of the result  
geometry same as latitude,longitude  
formatted_address returns human readable complete address  
id unique id of current location  
url url of current location  

For more information about address components visit: Google Address Component Types

Auto Populate

To auto populate data to the field. Just set that field’s ID same as one of Address Component Type above. For example, you create a number field with ID postal_code. The postal code type will auto populate to that field if exists.

Long name and Short Name

Let’s say we have a country named ‘Australia’. The long name is ‘Australia’ and short name is ‘AU’. And so on, if we have a state named ‘Queensland’, so ‘Queensland’ is the long name and ‘QLD’ is the short name.

By default, Meta Box Geolocation will populate the long name of the field. But you can use the short name by adding _short at the end of field id. For example: administrative_area_level_1_short, country_short

Binding Template

The power of Meta Box Geolocation is you can bind anything into a field. Let’s say we have a field with id dummy_field, this field id is not in Address Component Types list so by default the plugin won’t auto populate data to it. Now we’ll bind administrative_area_level_1 to that field. Just add

'binding' => 'administrative_area_level_1'

Example Result: Queensland

You can tell that field to use short version by prepending short: keyword

'binding' => 'short:administrative_area_level_1'

Example Result: QLD

You can also merge two fields, add any character you want to bind to that field. Like so:

'binding' => 'short:administrative_area_level_1 + " " + country'

Example Result: QLD Australia

Multiple autocomplete addresses

In case you have multiple “group” of address fields, such as address details for head office and address details for a company branch. In each group, there are an autocomplete address field. And it will autopopulate only fields in the group, e.g. the address for head office only populates the fields in the head office group, not in the company branch.

In this case, please set another attribute 'address_field' => 'address_id' for each field in the group. See an example code below:

/**
 * Head office
 */
 
// Address
array(
    'id' => 'address_ho',
    'type' => 'text',
    'name' => 'Address - Head Office',
),
// City
array(
    'id' => 'city_ho',
    'type' => 'text',
    'name' => 'City - Head Office',
    'binding' => 'locality',
    'address_field' => 'address_ho', // THIS
),

/**
 * A company branche
 */
 
// Address
array(
    'id' => 'address_br',
    'type' => 'text',
    'name' => 'Address - Branch',
),
// City
array(
    'id' => 'city_br',
    'type' => 'text',
    'name' => 'City - Branch',
    'binding' => 'locality',
    'address_field' => 'address_br', // THIS
),

Google API Key

By default, Google Geocoding API has the usage limit. See here. The free Google Geocoding API works in almost case but sometimes, you need to add API Key, or want to add custom params to URL.

Since version 1.2.0, to add Google API key, you need to specify it in the geo parameter, as follows:

'geo' => array(
    'api_key' => 'YOUR API KEY',
)

If you’re using Meta Box Builder, then please go to tab Settings and add a custom attribute for the Google Maps API key as follows:

adding google maps api key in builder

Make sure you enabled the Geocoding API to make the autocomplete feature works!

Prior version 1.2.0, you need to use a filter to gmap_api_params like so:

add_filter( 'gmap_api_params', function( $params ) {
    $params['key'] = 'YOUR API KEY';
    return $params;
});

Also notes that since version 1.2.1, if you use Geolocation with map field, you need to enter the Google API key only once, either for the Geolocation extension or for the map. No need to enter the same key for both of them.