directing user based on country

miju

yo , yo another quick question , we're planning to "export" the site in my siggie there across the water , more than likely to the US , UK , so 3 seperate sites all hosted on the one server but each site localised per country

now just looking into redirecting a visitor who goes to www.cpu.ie from the UK for example to a UK version of the site , would this be the best way of doing it?

mneylon

I'd do it server-side using Maxmind...

miju

hmm maxmind looks interesting all right , think their modGeoIP is bang on the money for what i need , in your experience blacknight would find server side or client side faster for redirection?

and does it have to be integrated with xoops & other php software we're running or can it be used and work ok as a "standalone" for want of a better phrase

mneylon

Server-side is more likely to work every time

With Maxmind you pay a monthly subscription and keep your own local copy of their database on your server, so any queries are run locally and you don't need to worry about connection speeds, browsers etc., etc.

There's no reason why you couldn't integrate it with a CMS or other software. We've done it both for ourselves and for a couple of our clients that needed to control acess to certain services / URIs based on country codes...

miju

cool thanks for that , mucho appreciated

democrates

You might want to allow the user to select their country manually too and save a cookie.

I'm with ntl and it seems to break out to the backbone in the uk, hence google is convinced I'm a brit and only gives a localise radio button for 'pages from the uk', so I've to put site:.ie at the end of local searches.

If I go any site and it won't let me see it's localised site for another country I get miffed if it looks like censorship.

miju

on NTL myself and know exactly what your talking about and was bearing this in mind , thanks

Serbian

blacknight wrote:

With Maxmind you pay a monthly subscription and keep your own local copy of their database on your server, so any queries are run locally and you don't need to worry about connection speeds, browsers etc., etc.

Blacknight is spot on with what he says. Server side is the way to go, using Maxmind GeoIP. I just wanted to mention that there is a free version available which is less accurate but is useful if you are on a tight budget or if you just want to get your head around how it works before paying the cash for the more complete version.

You can get the free version here. I would recommend downloading the CSV version and using it in a MySQL database (or whatever database you are using). There are good instructions on the site on how to use the CSV file with a database. I don't think I would do it at the server level personally as you can't take a cookie into account (which could store a users preferred country), but that's just me.

mneylon

Serbian - we use it to help stop fraudulent signups and it works