Store Locator Plus Power 4.9.1 improves location imports. It is available for WordPress now and will be updated in our end-of-year release for MySLP users.   Here it what was patched and improved.

All Users (MySLP and WPSLP)

Address 2 column on CSV import files was incorrectly being mapped to the address field.   This has been resolved.

The location import processing has vastly improved progress indicators on the import sub tab.  Check them out.

WordPress Specific

Store Pages custom post types , that are included with Power, correctly registers with WordPress 4.9 showing the sidebar menu.

Power has been updated to work on servers running PHP 5.3.  You really should upgrade to PHP 5.6 if you value site security, not too mention performance.  PHP 5.3 has been out-of-date for several years now.  Actually jump right to PHP 7 if you can.

General Notes

Import and Basic Auth

The new import process requires that your site be able to run WP Cron.  Some hosts and site admins turn that off for “security reasons”, but there is limited-if-any security risk with that process.  Not running it not only will prevent the new imports from running but stops lots of other things from working in WordPress; like automated updates.

If your site is using basic authentication, you’ll know if it is, the import processor cannot start the second (reading the CSV file) and third stages (geocoding locations) automatically.    You’ll need to be logged in as an authorized user and surf to your website/wp-cron.php to kick things off.     Some development and staging sites use basic authentication to prevent a casual web surfer or search bot from accessing a site they are working on.

Marker Not Found Notice On Settings Page

If you are seeing “marker not found” notifications when going to your Settings tab in SLP, this could be an obvious indication that basic auth is running on your site.    Our marker-testing uses the built-in WordPress “get this web thing” function which access something, like your marker URL , as if it is a “Joe Public” web user just surfing the web WITHOUT typing in special access codes or passwords.     As a side note, if you are seeing that notification there is a good chance that someone visiting your site with a browser you’ve not tested yet is getting a map with no markers on it.

Tag Based Location Searches

No, we’ve not completely fixed the TAG search in this release.   The tag searching is better, but still not 100%.  We are actively chasing down that bug and a few others for the SLP 4.9.2 + Power 4.9.2 release.

Other Updates

We are working on getting Premier to run on PHP 5.3 servers (you ARE going to upgrade to PHP 5.6, right?) along with some other minor patches.

If you have issues please post in the forum (this shows up in our dev teams Slack channel) or Contact Us via email.  If using the forum, please start your own thread if you are sharing information about your site and want help debugging.  Include a link to your locator page and copy the content of your plugin environment (for WPSLP users) or profile (MySLP users).

Keep in mind that if you updated OTHER THINGS like WordPress, another plugin, or a theme… those can break Store Locator Plus.    SLP is the most visible thing you’ll see if your JavaScript breaks as the search form stops working.  Nobody usually notices a slide-out menu not sliding out but a search for locations is front-and-center.   Check your browser’s developer tools and look in the console for error messages.   We’ve had several sites update things like their them which was missing a library, such as Lightbox, that breaks JavaScript and stops the locator from running.