Adding a “location” to a church website is a no-brainer. Adding a static map is even better and best of all is adding a Google Map, but now a new Route Planner plugin will allow people to simply enter their own address right below the Google map and it will spit out turn-by-turn directions to your church or venue and chart it on the map for them.
When I launched this site, I knew I wanted to create a directory of designers and developers who loved both WordPress and ministry, and who had published ministry-oriented sites in the wild using WordPress as their platform. Furthermore, I wanted it to be geo-centric so that ministries could easily locate people within their own geographic regions. How did that directory happen? SimpleMaps, which utilizes Google Maps API for geo-coding.
SimpleMaps is… simple. There’s not much to it. It was originally released as a store locator tool. I initially used it when developing a site for a pet product company that wanted customers to locate all the Walmarts and Dollar Generals where their pet bones were sold. Then I rolled it out for a small Baptist association who wanted a geo-centric directory of their churches. Then, I used it here.
I have plans to fork the plugin to add many more features, such as social linking, etc., but I also think it’s a great little plugin for churches that want to geographically present the small groups they have available. There’s room for a description, a link, a phone number, and other information. It’s all presented as tabular data and the developers were even kind enough to make it easy to call its javascript only on the page on which it appears. Smart!
I’d love to see this used for this or some similar purpose, or I’d love to see something even better… that ties into WordPress, of course!
