Search by location

Hi all,

Relative newbie here.

I have an idea for a site that I want to build but am not entirely sure how/where to start with a key part of it.

I am wanting to create a kind of directory. From the user point of view I want to provide the facility to search by town, postcode, area etc and have options on results filtering. For example search by locations within x miles and have tick boxes for other criteria, say 'family friendly' or 'has xxx facility' etc. The query will be against information in the database. Whilst I can begin to imagine how the category things may work really clueless on the the geographical side........

If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be great. I would certainly consider buying a template or some such as this is way beyond my experiance level and I would like to see it up and running in less than the time it may take me to figure out how to make it all work.

Any help is much appreciated and I hope I have put this into the correct forum.

Cheers

Andrew

Well, if you have the longitude and latitude of the locations, then with a bit of Pythagoras you should be able to compute the distances.