Tim Almond

I should probably together a video on this, but here’s a (reasonably) nice way to put Google Maps on your Wordpress Blog.

1. Get a Google Maps API Key. You go to http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html and enter yoursite and you get a key. Keep this key.
2. Download the XML Google Maps plugin, unzip, place in your Wordpress plugins folder and activate it. In the options screen, enter the Google Maps API Key that you got in stage 1.
3. Install and run Google Earth.
4. In Google Earth, add a new folder under the “My Places” folder, with a name relevant to your project. Move around adding the places you want. When the places are complete, right click the new folder, and choose the “save as” option and save it as a .kml file.
5. Upload the .kml file to the server.
6. In a page or blog post, add an <a … entry in the form <a href=”http://www.website.com/maps/map.kml”></a>
7. That’s it. The map with the points you selected is shown.

There are options that can be changed in the anchor for the maps (for instance, at what level you want to zoom out to). Also, the KML files aren’t always as complete as one might like, but being in XML format, changing them isn’t too tricky.

Tags: Wordpress, Google //