Have you ever checked the accuracy of your location marker compared to where it appears on the widely used google maps application? If you do, you may notice that the latitude and longitude and position of your marker is not exactly the same as where it appears in the Google Map.
The exact location marker on your map may be slightly off by a few feet or meters from the actual location shown in the Google Maps App. Both are using Geocoding (the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), which you can use to place markers on a map, or position the map, so why the difference?
A built-in feature on all Store Locator Plus products from the free WPSLP downloadable plugin to the fully managed MySLP service is one-click deployment of new interface styles. Our locator Style Gallery server is updated form time-time-time with new styles you can try as well as tweaks to existing styles.
Today’s Updates
We cleaned up the styling for the hours that are displayed in the results listing , placing them on their own line in the results output. This update is available to all MySLP and WPSLP users.
Map with hours
We also cleaned up the Directory Landing Page for users that employ the directory feature for WPSLP Power.
The change is immediately available to the following locator styles:
Don’t worry, if you selected a locator style already it will not change even if we update your selected style on our server. If you want to update your selected style to or latest version you must select a different style from the plugin gallery first, then re-select the style you were using.
Keep in mind that some styles in our Style Gallery will change your locator settings. The styles that change settings clearly note that they will do so in the description. Read the descriptions before clicking that “Activate” button.
How To Select A New Style
For MySLP start from Advanced Options in your dashboard.
For WPSLP start from Store Locator Plus on your admin login.
Go to Settings > View
In the Appearance section you will see a list of available styles from our Style Gallery.
Hover over the bottom edge of the “card” showing the style information and click the Select button when it appears.
Selecting A New Locator Style
How To Update Your Style
Follow the above steps and start by selecting a locator style that you are not currently using.
Follow the above steps and re-select the style you were using originally. This will re-load the style and the settings from our gallery server.
For our WordPress plugin users the Premier add on has been updated to 4.9.1 today to address several issues. The WooCommerce interface has been patched to fix a problem for users on non-English sites. Version 4.9.1 also has been re-tooled to work with PHP 5.3, though you really should be running PHP 5.6 as a minimum.
MySLP Enterprise users will be getting the button bar in our year-end update of MySLP.
Button Bar Category Selector
The new Button Bar category selector, introduced in our previous release, now honors the “hide empty categories” setting. However, unlike the other category selectors using a drop down selector coming from WordPress Core, our custom button bar interface behaves more along the lines of how we think it should. With the button bar a category is considered empty only if no locations are attached to that category.
How is that different? A little more explanation is warranted.
A Button Bar On A Customer Site
Hide Empty Categories
This is a setting that is available via the Power addon. Yes, the Power add on. I know we are talking about Premier here, but let’s forget about that detail for now. Premier only adds some new user interfaces to the underlying category features provided by Power.
The Power add on allows you to attach categories to locations, such as “put all these locations in the wholesale category” and “these go in the retail category”. You can then provide an easy way for users to filter the locations they see on your map by selecting whether they want to see retail or wholesale locations. The default category selector , if you choose to show it, is a simple drop down menu that shows any categories you’ve added to Store Locator Plus.
Normally ALL categories you’ve created are shown. Even if there are NO locations that exist within the category. If you have NO wholesale locations and someone picks that from the drop down category selector they see no results.
A long time back we added a “Hide If Empty” option for the category selector. However there is a big “gotcha”. It uses the WordPress built-in functionality for category drop downs since we didn’t want to rewrite their huge category drop down menu library. No need to re-invent the wheel. BUT this built-in selector has a rather unique way of defining what is an empty category. For WordPress a category is empty if everything assign to the category is in draft mode.
Draft Mode? What?
Yes, draft mode. We also did not want to write our own custom category engine. Actually, to be honest WE DID do that back in Store Locator Plus 1.0. It was a disaster. Why recreate something built into WordPress? Around SLP 3.0 we converted everything to use the WordPress category system. That system uses a lot of underpinnings from pages and posts. I think you can see where this is going.
What does that mean for hide empty?
As noted in a little not on the Hide Empty checkbox, this feature ONLY WORKS IF PAGES ARE ENABLED. Yup, if you are using Hide Empty to not show some things on that category drop down you must ALSO be using Pages ( Enable Pages is under the General tab, BTW). Not only that but you must change the default to be PUBLISHED instead of draft mode, which creates public SEO friendly pages for every location in your database.
You need to do that because if you don’t the WordPress category drop down creator will consider every page set to draft or private mode to be “unused” , which means those locations are not counted as part of the category.
So… The Button Bar Hide Empty
If you are using the button bar to show a category selector you can also use hide empty. Empty means NO LOCATIONS are using that category.
For the other category selectors, like any of the drop down selectors, the old-school “it is empty if pages it not enabled” still applies. We’re working on fixing that in the Power add on in a future release.
