Just another quick little note to let readers know that we have just finished a Joomla component that can successfully download and maintain an updated local database version of the brilliant location data found at http://www.geonames.org it is not stable enough for us to release it but we can use it as a foundation for building similar applications. So don’t hesitate to contact us if you need to implement Geonames data on your own web site. Especially if it is a Joomla web site.

Creating the import was quite complicated as all the geonames files are zipped CSV files so we needed to program an application that could doanload, unzip and try to convert the data into database inserts. After much swearing and long evenings we have managed to come up with a very robust solution.