Needs improvements for international users!

Thanks for the feedback David ??

there needs to be an adjustable search radius by the user where to search (for example 10 km, 100 km, 500 km

Can you give some specific examples of where the default radius — 100km for meetups, 400km for WordCamps — is too small (or too large)?

My current feeling is that a customizable radius seems like it’d add too much complexity for a dashboard widget (decisions, not options). So, before we consider that, I’d like to see if we can tweak the default radius to cover most use cases. If that doesn’t work well, though, then a customizable radius might be a good option for v2.

There are some map images that show examples of the current radius in the comments on the make/Communtity post.

when I try to type in “berlin” for Berlin/Germany, it does not use the German capital, but a city/location named “New Berlin” somewhere in the U.S.A. – this should not happen, or at least be adjustable with country-search enabled or a setting for the country

There are lots of cities that share names, so the events API tries to determine the one that’s closest to you. Are you currently traveling to the US, or using a VPN located in the US? Or maybe your user locale is set to en_US?

You can reveal the exact query that’s being made to the API by following these steps:

1. Opening the Network tab in your browser console
2. Type in a city name
3. Open the admin-ajax.php request in the browser console
4. Look for the Response, and then look for the request_url field towards the end of the response body. It should look something like "api_request_info":{"request_url":"https:\/\/api.www.ads-software.com\/events\/1.0\/?number=3&ip=192.168.1.100&locale=en_US&timezone=America\/Los_Angeles&location=berlin","response_code":200} If it’s not clear, just copy/paste the entire response here and I can take a look.

Once know we the exact URL being requested, that’ll help troubleshoot why you got the wrong city.

search for a country like Germany is not possible yet – but should be, absolutely –> there are a lot of smaller countries, but even for countries like Germany makes sense, to have this option

Hmmm, that used to work, and the API still returns correct results, but the widget isn’t displaying them anymore. Thanks for pointing that out!

Tracking that at https://github.com/coreymckrill/nearby-wordpress-events/issues/35

I couldn’t find any info yet on how event results are included – so my location is near Czech Republic, so when search I want Czech WP events to be included like WordCamp Praha or so on — therefore we need search radius setting at least!

There’s a separate plugin called Official WordPress Events, and it runs on make.www.ads-software.com/community. It pulls in events from WordCamp.org’s API, and the Meetup.com API (for all official meetups), and stores them in a database.

Let me know if you see any official groups whose events aren’t being listed.

search for a country like Germany is not possible yet – but should be, absolutely –> there are a lot of smaller countries, but even for countries like Germany makes sense, to have this option

This should be fixed now if you don’t mind trying again.

I get “New Berlin” for an input of “Berlin” when my locale is default en_US:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2oa85vt7bj7rmxw/www.ads-software.com-support-reply-9046671-1.gif?dl=0

However, when my locale is de_DE, it perfectly selects Berlin, Germany:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zfruvt6qm642d21/www.ads-software.com-support-reply-9046671-2.gif?dl=0

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by Anonymous User 7658014.

Ah, ok. Does that seem correct to you, or do you think it should return Berlin, Germany when the locale is en_US?

All my WP installs are using the default language. Thus, locale is normally set to en_US. No, switching to German involves lots of hassles, as it DOES NOT improve the overall usability. Looking up specific parts turn into a huge amount of effort, eg. the meaning of the WooCommerce product sorting options in the same configuration dialoge, and so on.

So yes, one should be a) able to switch the current location in the widget options, and b) either custom radius (input field) or a range for the km amount would be great.

Else I foresee this worthy effort turning into another useless, time-wasting dashboard widget ??

Thanks, I think we’ll need to display a list of potential location results, and let the user choose from that. That’s outside the scope of v1, though.

For the radius, I’m still looking for specific examples of where the current radius doesn’t work. So far no one has given any.

A bit late on this but still think it deserves a comment. I would say that the distance of 400km for a WordCamp is a tad bit small for some countries. For Sweden that would make the yearly WordCamp held in Stockholm, the only one in Sweden recent years, invisible to the 2nd and 3rd largest cities.

For example Gothenburg is located ~400km more or less exactly from Sthlm and Malm? is located ~500km from Sthlm.

Would be more beneficial to base the community events on the country/region, as language barriers makes it less interesting for people to visit other countries, even if they might be located closer.

Would be more beneficial to base the community events on the country/region

That would work for some countries, but definitely wouldn’t for many others. Countries like Russia, Canada, and Mexico are too large for that to be practical.

It’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of this widget isn’t to help insiders like us keep track of 100% of the events that we’re interested in; the purpose is to introduce new people to their local WP community. I don’t think the type of user that this was built for is likely to drive more than 4 hours for a WordCamp.

I could be wrong about that, though; do you think the average WP user in Sweden who has never heard of a WordCamp would drive 5 hours? 6? Keep in mind that, at that distance, they’d probably also need to pay for a hotel room, etc.

It’s also not necessarily a bad thing if people don’t see any events within driving distance. When that happens, the widget displays a message encouraging them to organize a local event. Once there’s a local meetup in their city, I think they’ll probably hear about non-local WordCamps like Stockholm by word of mouth, and are more likely to attend, since they’ll be more engaged in the community at that point.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Ian Dunn.