KML Description with Image PostThumbnail

G’day popsantiago,

Looking at the checkin page, the Paris link has that post thumbnail. It just needs a <br/> or something, or wrap the description in <p> to make it a separate paragraph. Alternatively, you could use CSS to style the image if you give the image a class.

Or am I missing something?

cheers,
Ross

G’day popsantiago,

Ah, I forgot that Google strips the classes from the KML. That’s just rude! Oh well. At least you got it working and looking pretty good!

To your other question, no, it isn’t safe. Better would be to use the constant ABSPATH which points at the WordPress root folder, best is to not load WordPress yourself; hook into it from a plugin or theme using action and filter hooks.

edit: I’m stupid, you won’t have ABSPATH until you load WordPress; duh!

You would be best served by writing a simple plugin to generate your KML dynamically. You can use the AJAX API to return your KML, and it then goes through WordPress but without all the bother of loading the whole front end. You can then use the WordPress $wpdb object to query the database, or even use WordPress queries if the data are in posts or postmeta.

(Actually, you could use the AJAX API from your functions.php in your theme, but I still recommend you write a plugin — keep functionality separate!)

Incidentally, I reckon using the DOM to write XML is rather ugly; much easier to use XMLWriter — it’s certainly my preferred tool for that job!

cheers,
Ross

G’day popsantiago,

If nothing else, take your code that works just fine, and wrap it up in a function you call from the AJAX API. You can hook that into your theme’s functions.php file very easily. No hard work there, honest! Something like this:

add_action('wp_ajax_ddworldtrip_maps_checkin', 'ddworldtrip_maps_checkin');
add_action('wp_ajax_nopriv_ddworldtrip_maps_checkin', 'ddworldtrip_maps_checkin');

function ddworldtrip_maps_checkin() {
    // your existing code here...
}

Done.

I recommend you use XMLWriter because it handles all the tricky bits of escaping special characters for XML. Easier than using the DOM, and safer than directly echoing KML. Also easier to balance open and close tags 🙂

cheers,
Ross

G’day popsantiago,

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. You change the src link to this:

http://www.ddworldtrip.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=ddworldtrip_maps_checkin

Also, last line of your new function should be die(); so that WordPress stops processing and sends your KML file.

cheers,
Ross

Can you email me your functions.php file? email address here… http://www.webaware.com.au/contact-us/

cheers,
Ross

Well look at you! Seems to me that your PHP is just fine 🙂

Well done, keep going!

cheers,
Ross

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that. Do you mean, show a specific marker’s info window? If that’s what you mean, then I don’t know how to tell KML to do that… maybe google for an answer on that one (there’s only so much I can know!)

cheers,
Ross