Locator Styling Updates

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.

Our Store Locator January 2023 Updates

Store Locator Plus® has been updated to patch various minor bugs and to improve code design as we move toward implementing new React applets that will modernize the user experience.    The updates in our mid-January release should be transparent to most users.   No action is required for our SaaS platform users.    WordPress plugin users will want to update to the latest version when convenient.

Patches To Our Store Locator Include…

Fix remote web asset test algorithm. This algorithm would sometimes generate a missing variable warning for urlToFetch. In some cases this would cause Store Locator Plus® to think remote web assets (images, CSS files, and other objects hosted on a different website) to show as missing. This has been resolved.

Update code variables, global naming conventions, and related background development elements. These changes are non-functional changes. They are mostly code comments that provide hints to the integrated development environments used by our developers to provider smarter code hints, autocompletion, and quality control services. These changes do not affect functionality.

WordPress PHP 8.1 Compatibility August 2022

We have received a couple of reports about Store Locator Plus® for WordPress not working with PHP 8.1.  The  WordPress PHP 8.1 compatibility is officially listed as “not compatible” in January 2022 and remains that way today (August 20th, 2022).   There is no official release date for WordPress on PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1 at this time.

Officially WordPress supports PHP 7.4.  As such, Store Locator Plus® for WordPress is only officially supported on PHP 7.4.

Users of the Store Locator Plus® SaaS service don’t have to worry about this. We’ve taken care of ensuring the location service is running on a stable platform

WordPress PHP 8.0 Status

However, we have tested WordPress on PHP 8.0 along with the latest release of theStore Locator Plus® for WordPress plugin.  It does appear to be working normally without notable warnings or errors.   While not officially supported, we do believe you can run WordPress and Store Locator Plus® for WordPress on PHP 8.0 without any issues.   With that in mind, we are providing support and patching services for the Store Locator Plus® for WordPress with PHP 8.0 installations.