Creating a User-Contributed Map with PHP and Google Spreadsheets

http://code.google.com/intl/ru/apis/maps/articles/communitymap.html

Pamela Fox, Google Maps API Team
November 2007

Objective

The web is full of communities centered around geographies and interests: people who love museums, European cathedrals, state parks, etc. So, there's always a need for a developer (like you!) to create a system where users can contribute geotagged places to a map, and that's exactly what we'll do here. At the end of this article, you'll have a system where users can register, login, and add geotagged places. The system will use AJAX for the front-end, PHP for server-side scripting, and Google Spreadsheets for storage. If you're accustomed to using MySQL databases for storage, you could easily modify the code here to use a MySQL database backend instead.

This article is broken up into the following steps:

• Setting up the Spreadsheet
• Working with the Zend Gdata Framework
• Creating Global Functions
• Registering a New User
• Logging in a User
• Letting Users Add Map Places
• Creating the Map
• Conclusion

Setting up the Spreadsheet