Your software is great for locating brick and mortar establishments in the vicinity of a particular zip code. However, what I need is the ability to associate calendar events that come and go with zip codes. In other words, I would like to have the ability to find nearby upcoming events. For example; I enter my zip code and the results tell me what events are going on in my area over the next several days. To get more specific, the visitor could specify within how many miles and far into the future to look for events. As far as I know, there is no script on the web that can do this, so you would be the first. What a powerful feature this would be if you could accomplish it. Thanks for your attention.

Thanks for the comments. That is a very interesting feature.

I don't see why Ultimate Locator couldn't do this as is.

I am thinking that you add an "Event" to your database, enter the name of the event, give it an address and then use the 5 custom fields to specify Event Times, Event Date, Event Activities.

You can add your Custom Fields to the 'Results List" so that when a user types in their zip code, they would see something like this:

Event Name: Town Meeting
Event Date: 7/23/2004
Event Times: 10:00am - 12:00pm
Special Guests: Tom Arnold

Then your users could click on the "Event Name" to get the FULL details about the event.

Once an event has passed, you could either hide the record or delete it completely. It would certainly work fine this way. You would have to keep your events current, as there would not be an "Automatic" removal of events that have passed, so they would show until you manually hide/delete them.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Brian

I think this is a good idea in general. However, at a minimum, I would need to have the following sorting scheme:

Primary sort by date (earliest at the top)
Secondary sort by distance (closest at the top)

Something like:

1. LAN Party (June 15, 2004) 10 miles
2. Computer Expo (June 15, 2004) 23 miles
3. AOL Users Meeting (June 22, 2004) 7 miles
4. LAN Party (June 22, 2004) 18 miles
5. Computer Fair (June 22, 2004) 20 miles
6. AOL Users Meeting (June 29, 2004) 2 miles
7. LAN Party (July 8, 2004) 5 miles

Would a dual sort be possible? Could we go even further and add a third sort of the event's starting time? Could such a sort be the default?

As far as manually hiding/deleting records of past dates, could there be some sort of automatic (i.e. cron) job that would run a daily SQL routine to remove records prior to the current date? If I choose to hide a past event, could I unhide it in the future, should that same event come back to life with a new date and therefore save me some typing?

Well, what you are trying to achieve is a little out of the scope of Ultimate Locator.

I believe, in order to sort on a date field, the field would have to be defined as a date field in the database, for best performance. The way I described in my last post, you would just be entering a date in a user field, which would actually be just text.

We would also have to customize the script to do what you are requesting. It will not do what you are asking without modification in how the program works.

Ultimate would work, if you wanted to sort on the closest location to the user, but not on the next event date.

A program can only do what it has been programmed to do.