Updating the locator styling default settings is the latest customer concern to be addressed as we continue to improve the overall Store Locator Plus® user experience. Updates are being made on a regular basis for both our SaaS platform users and WordPress plugins users. The latest update focuses on changing the default layout that users see when they first use Store Locator Plus®.

The Locator Styles

Locator Styles is a pre-defined set of Store Locator Plus® settings combined with a set of cascading style sheets (CSS) to go with those settings. The idea is to help users by providing a set of pre-defined layouts for the locator applet along with common settings users prefer when using our locator and directory software. For example, the pre-defined settings will change things like the internal applet layout — when a visitor searches for your retail locations do the list of locations appear on the left side of the map, or below? It can also set things like “do you want to show the label Phone ” before displaying a phone number or show nothing at all?

The idea is to provide a solid starting point of pre-loaded settings that can be modified after the base style is set.

For example, here is a basic map layout using the “Default” locator style:

The Default Locator Style

And the same applet using the AI Swarm Full layout:

AI Swarm Full layout

Changing Styles

The settings and CSS for these styles are read from our Locator Styles server, allowing us to make changes or introduce new styles at any time without affecting your site. New settings are only applied when actively clicking the “Select” or “Reload” button under Settings | View | Locator Style, which means your work will not be overwritten by changes on our end.

That also means we can respond to customer feedback and make changes that you can take advantage of by simply reloading a style. Keep in mind that any of the settings listed in the “changes” section for a Locator Layout will be overwritten, so save your work if you’ve tweaked specific settings in Store Locator Plus®.

What the default style changes….

January 2023 Default Style Updates

Our late-January update has made a couple of minor changes the default layout. This will impact new users only. If you already have your locator set up, you can fetch these updates and change your site by going to Settings | View and clicking “Select” or “Reload” on the default style. Note: this will change multiple settings on your site, please read the notes above.

Replacing [slp_location phone] with [slp_location phone_with_label] in the Results Layout.

This has the effect of placing the phone label before the phone number in the results, as seen in the images above.

Change the default phone label from “Phone” to “Phone “

Note the trailing space. This ensures the phone number has a space before rendering the number itself.

January 2023 Admin UI Updates

We’ve also made some admin UI updates related to the Locator Style interface, cleaning up some CSS issues that were missed when the underlying Vue and Foundation libraries were updated.

The updated locator style selector.

Custom Locally Hosted CSS Dropped

In the past the most effective way to manage custom CSS for the locator pages in WordPress was to upload a custom CSS file to the plugin upload directory. The original system would show a list of uploaded CSS files on the Plugin Style drop down under Settings | View | Appearance. This method of providing custom CSS is no longer supported.

The original Plugin Style setting is now defunct.

Years ago, Store Locator Plus® added a custom CSS setting on the same setting page. This eliminated the need for the custom CSS file uploads and this setting remained for legacy users on version 4.x and earlier (through mid-2017). In the meantime WordPress added built-in CSS overrides in the theme system, via Jetpack, and in most themes. As such we have officially dropped support for the uploaded CSS files. Most users converted to newer methodologies years ago. For those that did not, copy the CSS from your uploaded CSS file and paste it into the Custom CSS box in Store Locator Plus®.

All users should have been working from the “A Gallery Style” setting , which initially reads locator CSS from our Locator Style gallery and stores it locally on your Store Locator Plus® account.

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post image via Pixabay