If they are not states or provinces, what are they? I believe all countries have official ISO standardized states/provinces. For example, Netherlands lists the following:

Aruba

Bonaire

Curaçao

Drenthe

Flevoland

Friesland

Gelderland

Groningen

Limburg

Noord-Brabant

Noord-Holland

Overijssel

Saba

Sint Eustatius

Sint Maarten

Utrecht

Zeeland

Zuid-Holland

Are these just regions that do not need to be included in the address for postal reasons? Would there be no negative affect to just omitting them from being requested or displayed?

I think the list of countries would have to have an additional field in the database to designate that the state/province field should not be required or displayed, but I wonder if some people would want this field to appear even if it's not required for postal addressing. If we remove the field for the countries not listed in your request, would anyone miss them?

OR...

Is there a way to make the fields dynamic so that certain countries have "state/provinces" while OTHER countries would only see this as an option, " Any state/provinces ? " where they could click on "yes" or "no" before the field appears .

@paul:

> "Are these just regions that do not need to be included in the address for postal reasons?"

Yes. They are just administrative areas, but that doesn't bother the normal citizen. They are not used as part of the postal address and usually you wouldn't find them in any forms.

@turner2f:

> "as an option, " Any state/provinces ? "

At least, I would have never seen such a behaviour when dealing with international forms/websites. For websites which do target an international or US-focused audience, the common behaviour seems to be to just hide the "State" field once I select "Austria" as country.

For example, here is an NL address, in it's usual way to write it:

Laan van Ram 39

7324BW Apeldoorn

The Netherlands

Or here, an German one:

Industriestr. 25

91710 Gunzenhausen

Deutschland

Or here an Austrian one:

Louis-Häfliger-Gasse 10

1210 Wien, Österreich

And a French one:

9 Rue du Bassin de l'Industrie

67000 Strasbourg, France

The usual format is always (while whether the country is on a new line is mostly personal preference, not country specific):

<STREET NAME> <HOUSE NUMBER>

<POSTAL CODE> <CITY>, <COUNTRY>

That's the way you would address a letter or package for all Western European countries I'm aware of and even the few Eastern ones I've yet worked with. Thought, some countries, such as UK, swap the order of house number and street name.

So yes, I guess a flag in the database table for each country to decide whether to show the states field would be the best solution.

(Don't worry, all those addresses are publicly known addresses of large data centers, I tried not to leak any personal information and those infos are public anyhow.)

Not the nicest one of forms I've found, but I just had to use this form by Maxmind: https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-data-correction-request/correct-a-geoip-location/

Since there is no signup required and you immediately can see the form: just give it a try. For example, select something else then US or Canada, then the "States" field will just disappear.

how about temporarily add an option either to show or hide this info. I believe there are blesta users that dont care, or only serve certain countries, thus having this option could help them from touching the source code.