Hi All,
I guess this is a multi-part question. I am building a membership site and want to have the accounts as international as possible.
What is the best way to collect phone numbers on a form that allows for international numbers? I'm not worried about storing them, just collection and validation. What I have now is a drop down with a country list that will add the country code, and then the number itself with validation for us/can/uk based on the country code, and then the extension. These will be stored as strings in 3 fields for cc/number/ext Does anyone have a better, solid solution for this, or perhaps seen one in action anywhere?
Ditto for addresses. What is the best way to go? Address/City/State/Zip/Country or just lines? I would like to be able to sort by these, so a single text field isn't a very good solution, though it is the most flexible.
This is also important because we may be sending actual mail to our members. I am put in mind of a few members I've had for other services that had addresses in countries I had never heard of, that even the woman at the post office couldn't tell if they were formatted correctly.
I want to have geodata in the db, at least country/state, for things like populating a state dropdown after selecting a country, field standardization, etc. Does anyone know of a great database that can be used as the geodata base of an app?