Event list for Joomla 1.5 with selectable cities and countries

I'm working on a renewal of Fajn.si and for this I'm using Joomla 1.5 and events extension written by Schlu.

I want to enable venue owners ability to insert their places by them selves.

Original EventList component has cities inserted in venues table as a string. And that is bad. Bad because of two things. Sooner or later users will insert inconsistent city names for their venues. And second argument is that city sorting can become slow when we have large number of venues. Large number for mysql indexed field should start with thousands if not ten or hundred thousands records so don't panic :) But still this is not proper database design and normalization.

Since I was working for an end client (myself) I didn't packed things together and they can't be installed trough administration interface of Joomla. At ooaykac (EventList forums) request I put mysql dump and files into a zip and you'll have to hack them manually.

To do so I recommend to use comparison software as BeyondCompare (google it - but unfortunately is not free -  however I believe there are tons of free alternatives). First install EventList extension and then compare it with my files to see differences. You should change database as well. Add cities and country table and add cityid filed to venues.

Beside cities and country adding I also added fields for GPS coordinates. In my experience coordinates are much more reliable (and I belive faster too) then address searching on Google maps.

Public part is not finished yet but I'm working on it. Check here in few weeks for further progress. If you have any questions please leave it as a comment below. I'll try to answer them as soon as possible.

If anyone creates installer out of this code, please let me know :) If you hack additional code, please let me know.

btw - any back-linking to my site would be appreciated ;)

Download source

#1 administration
#2 component
#3 module

EventList by Schlu

It's free software and Schlu put many hours of work into it I'm sure. And I am thankful that he shares code with rest of us.
However there are some things that bother me.

Filters and lists for example. I don't know why they are done in each view separately when it is obvious that this should be done in a single place and then included where necessary!


UPDATES:

27. 12. 2008 - since problems with downloading have been reported I added third download mirror
28. 12. 2008 - started on frontend developement ... problems with duplicated filters and lists described at "My critique on .."
31. 12. 2008 - component and module modifications available for download