How do I get to the best local milkshake?

July 16, 2007 1:31 PM

Is there an existing CMS that can drive a website that allows people to rate local restaurants, and that will provide driving directions to those restaurants?

I want to start a website that does restaurant reviews in a particular city, but only for restaurants that serve a particular dish.

I'd like a way for a visitor (who has registered their address) to see the n closest restaurants that serve that dish, ordered by numerical rating of the tasty-ness of the dish...and ideally get driving directions.

Is there a CMS out there that is set up for automated user account generation, ratings (something like 0-5 stars) *and* that has the ability to generate driving directions?

I'm aware that the GoogleMaps API will let me do this, but before I jump into that, I thought I should ask around.

posted by Wild_Eep to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

You mean something like yelp?

(Which doesn't even come close to answering your question, I know.)
posted by MarcieAlana at 1:48 PM on July 16, 2007

Response by poster: Yelp does a portion of what I intend to do, where it lists the names of the restaurants and some ratings, and the part where people can create an account to post reviews, but (as you noted) it doesn't allow me to say "how do I get to the place that makes this highly-rated dish, the one with the fresh strawberries?"
posted by Wild_Eep at 2:10 PM on July 16, 2007

Response by poster: It also (unless I missed it) doesn't allow me to see a menu from the reviewed restaurants.
posted by Wild_Eep at 2:11 PM on July 16, 2007

Is there a CMS out there that is set up for automated user account generation, ratings (something like 0-5 stars) *and* that has the ability to generate driving directions?

No.
posted by unixrat at 2:31 PM on July 16, 2007

I'm pretty sure the answer to this is no - definitely not out of the box. However, you might try looking at a few CMS out there and investigate their module repositories.

Drupal and other such CMS often have "ratings" modules, which might be able to be combined with mapping modules, etc...
posted by twiggy at 2:39 PM on July 16, 2007

I've done something like what you describe with Ice Cream New York, using a directory script plus a separate zip code locater script.
posted by Soliloquy at 2:51 PM on July 16, 2007

Drupal and other such CMS often have "ratings" modules, which might be able to be combined with mapping modules, etc...

Drupal can definitely be 'mashed' with google maps: take a look at the 'location' module for a good start.

You *will* need JS and PHP experience in order to get the functionality you desire, however -- it's nowhere near to turnkey. You'll also need to put in some serious work to make it look unique -- Drupal is very flexible, but its flexibility means that it exposes a lot of its guts by default, where most people would probably prefer them to be hidden.

To answer your original question: I'm not aware of any turnkey CMS/Mapping combos (you might see if there's a Joomla solution, but I doubt it) -- almost every map 'mashup' I've seen has been custom-built (except for the few I've seen where the content is managed by Drupal).

Neither am I aware of a better mapping solution than the one already offered by the google api.
posted by fishfucker at 3:11 PM on July 16, 2007

You could offer some money for a license to the code driving Lopico. It's not mine, but it's PHP/MySQL and does this stuff.

Warning: People who have moderately good ideas for websites but no knack for technology are at a severe disadvantage when creating web sites / ventures. I don't think that's said enough nowadays.
posted by tmcw at 6:11 PM on July 16, 2007

Didn't mean that to be an asshole comment.
posted by tmcw at 8:13 AM on July 17, 2007

Response by poster: No offense taken. In fact, I agree completely!
posted by Wild_Eep at 9:29 AM on July 23, 2007