Is it possible to have a landing page based on the visitors location?

2 comments

1. • The modern way would be to use html5 which does support geolocation: simple demo
   • A bit longer explanation how this could be added to a web-app here
   • A nice php script that uses a web service called geoplugin (the api is nice, no idea about the company, ymmv!)
   • And last but not least, using the html5 geolocation from php (which you would need for wordpress) at stackoverflow

   The latter has a nice explanation how to use modernizer which could then combine html5/geolocation with some webservice or something.

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2. It is possible to get very fuzzy location information for most people, most of the time by using the IP address and a geoIP service. I say “fuzzy” because what you frequently get is the location of the ISP’s servers, not the specific location of the particular IP address. For example, from home my IP comes up listed as being about 30-40 miles away from where I actually am. Also, some people may be visiting through a proxy which could be hundreds or thousands of miles away from their actual location. If those are acceptable parameters, then something like…

   $IP = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDRESS'];
   // get location data
   // I am using freegeoip.net for this
   // I can't vouch for the service. It is just an example,
   // but I queried my IP and it worked well.
   $location = wp_remote_get("http://freegeoip.net/json/{$IP}");
   // var_dump($location);
   // location information is in $location['body']
   // check status
   if ('200' == $location['response']['code']) {
     $geoloc = json_decode($location['body']); 
     var_dump($geoloc);
     // and you get this
     // stdClass Object
     // (
     //   [city] => xxx
     //   [region_code] => xx
     //   [region_name] => xx
     //   [metrocode] => xxx
     //   [zipcode] => xxxxx
     //   [longitude] => xxxxxx
     //   [latitude] => xxxxxx
     //   [country_code] => xx
     //   [ip] => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
     //   [country_name] => xxxxx
     // )
     // you know have what you need to switch your homepage content
   }
   

   freegeoip.net limits requests to a 1000 per hour, so be careful that you run the code only when necessary– set a cookie, something. I’d recommend caching the data to reduce requests count and to reduce the overhead/lag of contacting a third party service.

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