Global distance search issues

[naturalfusion]

First off, absolutely great plugin, Well done. Hopefully, you can help with a problem that I am having.

The goal is to search for photographers from a point(latitude and longitude) and order the results by distance from that center point. The below code works great, however, we are getting limited results. For example, if I do a search from the center point Bangkok Thailand, we are only getting photographers in Asia, and not in North America. The same results happen when doing a search in North America, no Asia photographers. I thought by increasing the mile radius (some large number like 24,901 miles) would solve this problem, but it results in no results. So the goal is to do a global search. Am I missing something? Thanks!

CODE USED

WP_GeoUtil::wp_buffer_point_mi($center_point,10000,8); $results = new WP_Query( array( 'post_type'=> 'photographer', 'orderby' => 'distance', 'order' => 'ASC', 'meta_query' => array( 'inbuffer' => array( 'key' => 'location', 'compare' => 'ST_INTERSECTS', 'value' => $buffered_shape ), 'distance' => array( 'key' => 'location', 'compare' => 'ST_DISTANCE', 'value' => $center_point, 'type' => 'DECIMAL(10,7)' ) ),
));

[nciske]

@andywalz Can probably assist you with this.

[andywalz]

@naturalfusion If a global search is what you desire then you shouldn't need to use ST_INTERSECTS at all, you should be able to just leave out the meta_query and still use distance for sorting.

Although coordinates are longitude/latitude, in MySQL it is assumed that they are planar. This will lead to errors/inaccuracies when considering large areas (like your buffered point with really large radius) or working on areas near the poles. You can read more about this here.