@litepack – would much rather continue this discussions in the BuddyPress Forums, as it is more suited for participation:
http://buddypress.org/community/groups/gpress/forum/
However, for those joining in at a later date, I like the idea of importing locations, but at present, we still need to (as a gPress community) decide what is best for the future of “places”, before we determine how to import and export the data for them.
There is a discussion in the gPress forum at the moment regarding this:
http://buddypress.org/community/groups/gpress/forum/topic/kmz-files/
When you say you would want to have the listing shown in a list format, have you looked at the “Recent Places” sidebar widget? You can title this whatever you like and choose to display as many “listed” places as you like. I guess it would be useful to be able to add this via a shortcode on posts and pages too?
Each time you add a place, it adds it as a new post type, with one location as a marker on the map within “The Loop” of that post type. Depending on how you set-up your advanced settings, you can show either posts, places or posts and place. It is also possible (using shortcodes) to add a map to any page that displays all of the locations within that one map. Some very basic documentation and examples of this can be seen at:
http://smalley.my/gpress/shortcodes/
The necessary shortcode for displaying all places on one map is:
[gpress place_id="all"]
With this in mind, does gPress do what you expected, or do you envision some other way of handling posts and places?
The only post type presently added by gPress is “place”, so the available post types on a standard WordPress install would be “post”, “page”, “comment” and “place”.
Both posts and places can have categories, and both have their own taxonomies, where a post archive would show each post for that category as an individual item, so too do the place category pages, showing each location as an individual place, as seen here:
http://smalley.my/gpress/blog/places/residential/
Adding multiple markers to a single map is more “directory” based in many ways, which is why the true power and potential of gPress really relies in BuddyPress.
One existing feature for using it with BuddyPress is that not only do you then get to add your own “user” location, but you are also able to display a map on your user profile page that shows all the geo-tagged posts you have made across the entire network.
In addition, all of our future directory based features will be specifically built for BuddyPress.
Have you used BuddyPress before?
