IP Location Database

When your website relies on a user’s IP address to deliver the right data to plugins, it is essential that the user IP data is always accurate and easily accessible to all plugins and script modules requiring it. The IP Geolocation database plugin builds the local IP database, which contains information on all IP addresses and their relevant location data.

How it works

The plugin creates a local database with data on users’ IP addresses. The database has a simple structure with basic fields, such as country, region and city to which the given IP address refers to.

When a software module or a plugin needs the information on a user’s IP, it may instantly retrieve it from the user session, which makes the script work faster and be more stable.

Front End

The user does not interact with the IP Geolocation database plugin directly and the plugin works completely behind the scenes without the user involvement. When a user enters your website for the first time, the plugin makes a single request to the Geolocation database and receives all the required location data from it.

The plugin then stores the data in the user’s session and no longer makes the requests to the database. Throughout a user’s session on your website, whenever a plugin or a script module requires user’s location data, it may easily retrieve it directly from a user’s session. As a result, the plugin prevents from repeated and unnecessary external requests to Geo services, thus not overloading your website.

Interaction with other plugins

Flynax script relies on user’s Geolocation data and many of the plugins require this data to display the right information to a user. With the help of IP Geolocation database plugin, the following plugins are able to get user location data faster:

• Multifield/Location Filter to enable filtering by location on the website;
• Search by Distance to detect user location on map;
• Location Finder, which retrieves the location data by IP;
• Currency Converter, which relies on IP to detect a country and display a price equivalent in a country’s currency;
• Banners Plugin to filter and display banners based on a user’s location;

Back End

As mentioned above, the plugin works behind the scenes and does not require any configuration from the administrator. There are only a couple of settings in the plugin manager: the first one allows you to manually update the IP Geolocation database to make it up-to-date.

The second setting allows you to select a default location, which will be used as a fallback location in case the plugin is unable to automatically detect a user’s location.

For instance, you may choose USA, San Francisco as a default location, and in this case, the user will see the ads in this location in case the plugin fails to detect a user location.