GeoPress, the WordPress plugin that makes it very easy to add location, maps, Microformats, GeoRSS, and KML to your blog, was has been neglected for awhile. Some very nice users have sent in bug reports and I’ve been working through these and update the v2.4beta to 2.4.1 today. You should be getting it from the WordPress Plugin repository. This way you get notified when new versions are available. If only WordPress had a simple mechanism for upgrading plugins without requiring downloading zip files and shell/FTP access.

Please let me know if you run into any issues. There had been numerous bugs in the beta – and I think most of these have been ironed out. I also updated the KML to use KML 2.2 and some simple atom links to your blog and post authors.

Also, the geopress_map function has some nice functionality for being embeddeable in Archive, Category, and Search pages. Right now the function signature is a little long, but if you want to have all your markers for a category or search show up in the map, you use the following in your template (assuming you want your map to be (200px high, 400px wide)

This will embed the map with unlimited (-1) locations from the category (unless you have lots of geo-posts in a single view). Check out my conference blog post archive.

There have been numerous requests for per-item and categorical styling. This shouldn’t be too hard to add. And also per-post zoom and map types. Also I will be updated GeoPress/MovableType to converge on the same feature-set.

Also – if you have any updates/patches/suggestions for GeoPress – chime in (and contribute code

Check out my post on GeoRSS Metadata over at the GeoRSS blog. Looking for some feedback and ideas on how to use the featuretypetag and relationshiptag elements of a GeoRSS entry. We’d like to put something into GeoPress to support them, but need to know what users would expect and want to use to refer to locations and tag them.

O’Reilly Radar was the first to announce the release of GeoPress, a WordPress blog engine plugin that allows you to easily add location to blog posts, embed dynamic maps, and add GeoRSS encoding to your RSS output.

There have been other geo plugins before. However, they usually required you to make your own modifications to your template and provided a fairly arcane interface. The goal of GeoPress was to make adding location as simple as possible. Once you install GeoPress (copy and unzip to a wp-content/plugins/geopress directory on your WordPress site), and activate it (on the plugins panel), your configuration is done. Then go to write a blog post and you’ll see a new area with a map and boxes underneath the post.

You can enter an address, or a city, or just a country, or even click on the map to set the location. You can then add a name which will be saved and can later be used for quick reuse. If you want to insert a map into your post, just type INSERT_.MAP somewhere in your post. You can also use INSERT_.ADDRESS and INSERT_.COORDS, which will insert the address and coordinates, in appropriate adr and geo Microformats. Since GeoPress uses Mapstraction, you can switch between displaying Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft maps with just a quick select in your settings.

There are also some PHP functions for modifying your template to embed maps or post locations. Using geopress_map() you can embed a map of all your locations. the_address() can be used in your post metadata to always automatically output something like “this post was written by Bob from Waikiki, Hawaii”.

Lastly, the part that will be most useful in the future, is that the locations your write about will be embedded as GeoRSS in your RSS feeds. Aggregators like Mapufacture or FoFRedux will now be able to aggregate your geographic data and allow others to easily find interesting places, and build mashups.

Please let me know what you think!