What's happening at OcularCMS^®

We are very excited to announce the addition of a new feature that opens up many possibilities and enhances how people find data. The ability to search has been built into the platform for many years. However, now users can find results within a specific geographic area. More specifically, users can find results within a user-defined distance of a user-defined location. For example, as website could offer the ability to "find massage therapists within 5 miles of 1 N State St, Chicago, IL". The range can be any number of miles and the location can be as specific as an address, or as wide as a ZIP or even city. And it can be used in conjunction with existing filtering capabilities to further narrow down results. This new geographic search feature is possible thanks to the technology behind thenew address field type and how it retrieves and stores geographic coordinates for each address. It is very efficient and only uses minimal resources to lookup coordinates. In addition to allowing users to define the search criteria, database views can be predefined to narrow results displayed on a page. For example, you could have a page called "massage therapists in Lakeview" and the results on the page would be only those that are within the area--without the user needing to filter out on their own.

If you'd like to take advantage of this functionality, contact us to discuss possibilities of how it could be implemented on your site.