Chapter Mapper

[Garrett]

A friend who is the webmaster of a car club sent me an e-mail earlier this morning asking me how I could do a "chapter locator" widget on their site for free. I've never done something like that - and I really have no PHP/MySQL experience (besides installing MySQL/PHP scripts.) This car club has almost 300 chapters, and they want to simplify the way their site visitor finds chapters closest to them, which is why they want a "chapter mapper."

They're looking something very similar to the "Locate a Store" widget on many store chains websites (other example include "Locate a Restaurant" widget on a restaurant chain website; etc.)

Does anyone know a free and simple way to do this? I do know that it will involve using a database to store which cities correspond with which city, and what cities are closest to a chapter.

Thanks ahead for your input. It's really appreciated.

[Jason]

I would google something like "store locator script"

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=store+locator+script

I see a number of them that could work but you'd have to tweak them to use your terminology.  Maybe just change "store" to "chapter?"   

You may have to hunt a bit for a free one. 

One of the first results in my search above looks pretty decent and is only $11 which is practically nothing considering the hours of development you'd need to have someone build it from scratch.  Freelance work like that could easily cost hundreds (if not thousands).