Geotargetting Content for Anonymous Users in Drupal

Submitted by Stuart Broz on Thu, 2010-06-03 08:58
Experience type: 
Site building
Programming / module development
Day: 
Sunday
Time: 
3:00pm – 4:00pm
Room: 
Duo Consulting

Come learn strategies for geo-targetting content to anonymous users in your Drupal sites.

Stuart Broz of Trellon, will present a case study of geotargetting content in Drupal, and how IP addresses and other information can be used to selectively present content based on where they are in the world.

Drupal has a number of tools for geotargetting information for people once they are logged in or have given you an address to work with. When it comes to targetting content for users where you only know an IP address, Drupal doesn’t really offer much out of the box. However, your web server itself can be a useful tool in delivering the data you need to geolocate your content, and there are a number of tools available for making more relevant information come up when people initially hit your site.

This session will focus on the following techniques for geotargetting content:

  • How to ‘plan’ for geotargetting, from a technical perspective
  • Benefits and drawbacks of various GeoIP databases and versions
  • Using mod_geoip in Apache to get latitudes and longitudes
  • Integrating this data with Views to present content
  • Integrating this data with Boost and Varnish to present alternate versions of content
  • Prepopulating forms for anonymous users with location data
  • Special caching and performance scenarios: keeping sites fast while geotargetting
  • Special considerations for iPhone and Facebook applications
  • Case Study: Earth Day Networks web site
  • Case Study: Openjurist.org web site
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