Store Locator Plus® Has Been Re-listed

Posted by lcleveland in Google Maps, Map Software, MySLP SaaS, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

It has been a year since Store Locator Plus® has been listed in the official WordPress plugin directory. The previous 12 months have been quite the journey to get the plugin re-listed — but we finally made it! Kudos to the development team for taking on the thousands of lines of code that make the Store Locator Plus® applications “go” and helping us get there. Thanks to the customer support team for helping keep things going while the dev team was getting up to speed and addressing all the concerns noted by the folks on the WordPress Plugin Team. It took longer than expected, but we finally have our plugin and the associated one-click updates for our install base back online.

Store Locator Plus® 5.13.8 for WordPress

The new release, Store Locator Plus® 5.13.8 is available for immediate download from your WordPress SLP account. Now that we have been re-listed you can also get our plugin directly from the WordPress plugin directory.

This update includes PHP 8 compatibility (use with caution, PHP 8 is still not officially supported by WordPress) as well as numerous internal security updates. It also patches some minor issues reported in the past year.

There are a LOT of code changes and millions of combinations of settings in Store Locator Plus®. We’ve tested compatibility with the premium add ons from Power, Experience, and Premier but your configuration may uncover an issue we did not discover. If you run into issues with the latests update please let us know and we’ll address the problem as quickly as we can.

We’re Back

Our business leader and original architect of Store Locator Plus® is back at it full time. Our tech leader has been very busy during the past two years, assisting Store Locator Plus® on a limited basis while working to get another tech startup off-the-ground. That company is now moving to the next phase and our leader is back and is 100% focused on bring the next generation of Store Locator Plus products and services to market.

Plans are in the works to improve the user experience, improve stability and performance, and branch out to natively support more web presence platforms and web developer tool kits. New features and services are coming to the SaaS platform, with a renewed focus on extending the reach of our software-as-a-service offering. Pricing changes are being discussed to ease the burden on small businesses.

There is a lot more coming. Be sure to subscribe to our news feed to keep up as we work toward the next generation of products and services.

Focusing On You

One of the first changes being employed is focusing on how we can help YOU, our established customer base. We have a lot of catching up to do and are committed to getting Store Locator Plus® back to the top of the locator software and services list. To get there we are going to need your help.

The best way to help? Communicating your needs. What can we do better? What features are missing or can be improved? Or drop us a note to tell us what we’re doing right.

We promise we’ll listen and do our best to improve our services and products.

Location Page Listings Enhanced

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus, WordPress, WPSLP

One of the few features that is not currently available for our MySLP SaaS users is the dynamic location details pages that are hosted on WordPress sites. Users that employ the Pages feature of the Power add on can link the web links for locations shown in the locator to a SEO friendly details page hosted on the website for every location in the database.

Another important feature of the Pages interface is the ability to list all pages that have been generated in a directory format via the [slp_pages] shortcode. This list provides an easy way to show locations without requiring site visitors interact with the map interface.

More Page Listing Controls

With the 4.9.14 release of the WordPress plugins, the Power add on now provides even more control over the page listings. When using the default “full listing” style, which shows the entire page template one-after-another, there are some new options available.

Hide The Map

Hide the map, is one such option. Most users opt to show a map showing where the business is when a user looks at the details page. However, loading a dozen maps stack one on top of another on a page listing slows down page rendering. The new no_map attribute allows you to turn the map on or off as needed.

Custom CSS Classes

In prior releases web designers could style the layouts for the page listings by adding custom CSS to their WordPress theme and reference the Store Locator Plus specific classes that wrap the page list as well as the SLP classes that wrap each individual page entry.

In the Power 4.9.14 release users can now replace the previously “hard-coded” Store Locator Plus classes used with these HTML elements with their own class names. This can be especially useful when using WordPress themes that are built on a standard library such as the common 12-column Grid Layouts in Foundation, Vuetify, and Bootstrap. That means you can let the theme’s default row and column controls manage the layout for the page listings instead of writing tedious responsive CSS rule stacks just for Store Locator Plus.

Even better – you can set these CSS classes with [slp_pages] attributes.

Like our recent location editor update, this is one more step on our journey toward moving Store Locator Plus toward modern web design standards.

We’re already using this on a couple of projects and think you’ll like the new implementation.

Map attributes have been extended in 4.9.7

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Store Locator Plus 4.9.7 “map attributes” update was released today for our WordPress users. The update is still in testing for MySLP users — some of the patches in this release are a direct result of the testing before integrating into our managed service. The updated release will be on the MySLP platform soon but will have limited impact on those users.

More shortcode map attributes for WordPress users

The [slplus] processor in the core plugin has been updated to allow more map attributes to be set. This update allows ALL options that have been migrated to the new Smart Options architecture (80% of all SLP settings at this point) to be used as an attribute. This greatly improves the ability to create custom maps on a per-page basis with settings that vary from the general “system wide” settings that come from the Store Locator Plus > Settings tab.

You can find the current list of supported attributes here:
https://docs.storelocatorplus.com/blog/slplus-shortcode-options/