I'm working on a proof of concept alumni site with a WordPress backend. I want to have a very simple map that shows where alumni are living. I'm thinking something like the Bing API or a simple open source solution - points on a map right now. Not sure yet how I will be getting locations, perhaps a user submission system somehow. Any ideas on good, solid, simple ways to accomplish something like this? I'm on a LAMP stack hosted with WebFaction, and I know just enough PHP to be dangerous.
EDIT: Here's what I ended up with. Jlivni got me looking the Google route and some hacking on this method gave me this: 
It's powered on the back end by a publicly viewable Google Spreadsheet. Pretty easy to implement and hack up. And I can pass of the editing of the spreadsheet to just about anyone and they can carry out that task.
Answer
It sounds like you have a few different things you need to do:
- Geocode your user locations (e.g. from an address / postal code)
- Store the locations/attributes somewhere
- Render them on a map
You can choose to do some or all of this using open source or other alternatives. If it were me, I would probably use some of Google's mapping stack (disclaimer, I work there).
Specifically, I would insert the data into Fusion Tables using their API. To have your Wordpress site automatically insert data there, you will need to authenticate using something like OAuth, perhaps using a library like this one and write some code to insert/update the data when the user changes it in Wordpress.
Now the hard part is over: With your user data (including a single address column) in Fusion Tables you can very easily embed a map showing all of your users by going to your table at google.com/fusiontables, clicking Visualize -> Map, zooming to your area of interest, and selecting the embed code that you can put into your site.
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