Okay, I've been messing about with the Joogle plugin over the last couple days and have gotten it working.
This is a post from what I've learned to help others along with the process. It's by no means complete and only follow-up posts will make it better. So pleas post your learning curve should this message have been of use to you.
By way of deduction, Joogle works the following way.
1) Joogle.php checks the database if there are addresses with at least city and state fields and lon or lat fields with the value 0.000000. If so it tries to accuire the correct lon and lat values for the specific address.
2) Joogle.php query's the available addresses (and extra fields) and sends them on to joogle.html.php for processing into a map.
3) Joogle.html.php processes the values, centers the map and adds the markers.
To install follow the guidelines
1) Unzip the application to your local drive.
2) Read the Read_Me_First.txt file
3) Edit joogle.xml and insert your API keys.
4) Hard code the urls of your site in the several links in the file joogle.html.php. E.g. the links to the markers/avatar and such.
5) Edit the file joogle.php and check the SQL query's. As europeans the check for state is useless as we don't have them. As such it checks if there's a value of 00 in the state field. Work your way around this by either changing the SQL query of setting the state value to default to 00.
6) Zip the files
7) Upload the files with your Joomla site component uploader
Use phpmyadmin (or something similar) to remove the second instance of Joogle in the components table. Be sure to remove the instance that DOESN'T have the API keys!
9) Check what's happening and edit your php in your own favorite way.
Here's some pointers on error checking.
1) All the lon/lat values have the same value.
-> After the first check all the subsequent values were overwritten with the first value. This happened to me when the SQL query was also pulling rows where there wasn't enough information to get the lon/lat values.
2) The map shows, but without any markers.
-> Check the URL of your markers. When in doubt, use some of googles:
icon.image = "
labs.google.com/ridefinder/images/mm_20_red.png
";
icon.shadow = "
labs.google.com/ridefinder/images/mm_20_shadow.png
";
3) The lon/lat values stay at 0.000000?
-> Check if there isn't a second instance of Joogle in the components table and it the API keys are in the Joogle instance.
I hope this helps, good luck.
