IP Mapping FAQ

The release is now available for download in the 'Download' directory. Registered users can view its usage upon our site by following the link 'Access Mapping' in the 'User Menu' (top right of page.). This does require that the user is logged in first in order to see the menu item.

Possibly. The earlier releases ran upon Joomla 2.5 but it is no longer officially supported by Joomla so we can not offer any support for the current IP mapping release.

Yes. The current release runs upon Joomla 3.5.x.

The full product documentation is available in PDF format at this web link. It covers all releases.

There are a few possible causes of this, but the most common is that the site is configured to use an .htaccess file which is preventing access to the mapping function, which generates the map markers. If you are using a '.htaccess' file then you need to add the following to the file:

RewriteRule ^modules\/mod_ipmapping_mapper\/map_data\.php$ - [L]

Note that the placement of the above line is important and placing it at the end if the file will probably not be sufficient, as it is likely that an 'earlier' line in the file may well result in the file to be exited prior to it reaching your newly placed line. It is beyond the scope of this FAQ to go into the complexity of the entries in the .htaccess file and it is advised to refer to the official Apache documentation for precise details.

It is reported (although not verified by us) that a second possible cause is the settings upon the map_data.php file.

Changing the permissions upon the file map_data.php in the directory "modules/mod_ipmapping_mapper/" to 755 is reported to solve the problem.

i.e.

cd modules/mod_ipmapping_mapper

chmod 755 map_data.php

This is not something we specifically recommend doing.

The component module that generates the maps is written such that each map is generated uniquely. This means that theoretically there is an unlimited number of maps that can be displayed upon a page. In practise however each map does take a certain amount to generate so having a large number of maps on a page will make the page creation a little slow. This may be improved by only generating the maps periodically and implementing caching etc.

The geographic locations are determined from the IPInfoDB itself, so are as accurate as those contained within the database. The component is using the 'free' provided information databases, but even the 'commercial' offering do not provide better accuracy than 40Km even in the USA. People are encouraged to update the database by submitting corrections for any inaccuracies that they may find on the IpinfoDB site.

We have seen instances where the IPInfoDB does not return any information for some IP addresses. To try to resolve these we perform a second lookup using the Geobytes service. This service permits up to 20 lookups per hour for non-registered users, hence is only used as a backup. We may implement a registration mechanism for Geobytes if there is a demand.

Depending upon the number of entries in the Akeeba Admin log table, it may take some time for the geolocation data to be populated. It is difficult to be very specific as to how long it will take since it depends upon the load upon the IP Info DB system as to how quickly it can respond. If you do cancel out of the update, you can rerun the sync process later and it will pick up from where it was stopped.

The information for the Akeeba Synchronisation required that Akeeba Admin is using the Web Application Firewall, which is only provided by the Pro version. Since this is not present in the 'Core' product the information is not present. In release 1.0.5 (and up) of IP Mapping the 'synchronisation icon' is not displayed if Akeeba Admin Tools Pro is not installed.

The visitors agent module does not use cookies, although it has been considered, so that it would limit the lookups of the geolocation data for the IP address of the visitor. It deemed to be a problem later this may be implemented but there are no current plans to do so.

The base language supplied is English. However the component has been written specifically to be able to support other languages. There are a number of submitted translations available. The list of available translations is show in the Translations area of the site.

We welcome any submitted language translations that users might like to contribute. These would then be made available to the whole community. We mainly use Transifex for managing component translations.

There is also a article upon our web site with details upon Transifex and how one can contribute as well as instructions upon how to package up a language translation for the a component.

The component has three possible API keys that may be specified.  The first is required to provide access to the IP InfoDB server to obtain the country mapping for the given IP address. This key is used in the back end of the component and also in the front end Visitor Module if HTML5 geolocation is used.  The key is usually required, unless one is going to rely upon the secondary country mapping provider Geobytes.

The other two keys are for the Google Maps API.  The first being a browser key and the second being a server key.  According to the Google Maps documentation either will work and are required under the latest Google policy guide.  Our tests have indicated that the key is not always required at all and our own site has continued to work despite no Google Maps API being provided.  However we have had reports that some more recent sites have had to provide an API key otherwise they see a NOAPIKEYS message in the console logs.

Our tests have revealed that indeed either the browser or the server key will result in the maps being generated upon the screen, although we discovered that it one or more HTTP referrers is specified for the browser key (on Google developers site) that the maps are not generated. Using the server API key has always worked in our tests.

If both a browser and a server API key are specified the server key is used for the Google Maps access.