Project Release: django-reploc 0.1.0-pre1

Here's yet another application to help you make your site more useful to your users. django-reploc is a "representative locator" for Django-powered Web sites. It uses the Google Maps API to offer your users an interactive map of your representatives, vendors, friends, houses, etc.

I built this application to be a dealer locator for one of my clients. The application provides a way for you to create "representatives," and each representative may have one or more locations. For example, say you are a producer of clothing and apparel, ranging from shoes to pants to t-shirts to sweaters to hats to bags and so on. Perhaps your bigger representatives (or vendors) carry your products in all of their retail branches. reploc gives you a way to display each of these locations for the one vendor on a map for your users.

In addition to that, while the bigger vendors might carry your products in all locations, perhaps some locations only carry particular lines of your products. For example, a vendor location in Miami, Florida might carry a good deal of your sandals and none of your sweatshirts, while a vendor location in Bangor, Maine might not bother with any sandals but keeps sweatshirts in stock year-round. reploc offers a way for you to describe which product lines each location carries by the use of "attributes".

However, it can be used for much more than just that. Pretty much any location that you can show on Google Maps (is there anything that can't be shown on Google Maps anymore?) can be displayed with this application.

Furthermore, you can search for locations within a certain radius of an address that your users specify! A nice circle is drawn on the map, making it visually easier to understand what is and isn't within range. To make things even easier, the locations that do not fall within the radius of the given address are hidden from the map.

Finally, once a user finds a location within the radius of the address they specify, they are able to get driving directions to help them get right where they need to go!

w00t!

To learn more, go to the project page: http://code.google.com/p/django-reploc/