for Store Locator Plus®
All those little location markers on the map that Google just made FAR more prevalent in their latest update? Those are what they call map icons. They are also clickable which means all those locations will pop up a map bubble even if they are not YOUR Locations for your business. Premier Add On v 4.7.1 or higher for Store Locator Plus or MySLP/Enterprise lets you disable the “clickability” on the map icons.
We need to filter our locations by brand. Does your plugin or an extension to your plugin have this feature?
Power add-on for WPSLP (DIY) or the Professional level plan (or higher) for MySLP is the right choice for doing that. Either allows for simple categories or parent/child relationships between categories. Locations can be assigned to one or more categories. Your users can then search for locations based on those categories.
For more complex hierarchical functionality , button bars , horizontal check-boxes for categories and more customized approaches you might want to check out our WPSLP Premier subscription or the MySLP Enterprise level subscription
Add a category for each brand you offer and your users will be able to filter locations showing only those that offer specific brands.
Power Add-on for WPSLP or the Professional level or higher for MySLP allows the administrator to schedule your Import process from a remote file retrieval (must be accessible public) to provide more control over recurring imports from a full url where you CSV file resides and allows flexibility for scheduling the time for daily imports.
WordPress CRON is not exact, it executes the next time a visitor comes to your site.
WordPress times are UTC/GMT time NOT local time. Set to none and leave the URL blank to clear the CRON job. Example: 14:25. (Default: empty = do not run daily cron)
Checking your server, PHP and MySQL to ensure the character set is correct will go a long way toward importing special characters like registration characters.
If you have the Power add-on for the Self managed WPSLP or if you have the Professional Level MySLP SaaS plan, you will have the ability to import data fields via a properly formatted csv file. All columns MUST have a header row with the correct field name. All fields are short text fields, up to 255 characters, unless otherwise noted. The header text is NOT case sensitive.
If you are using the category functionality of Power you may want to import and assign a category slug on the fly. The header field name is:
category (or plural categories).
If you wish to import and assign more than one category per location , you will need to use a comma-separated list for the data field (category). Example: My location has more than one category associated with it, I want to indicate it is a hotel,restaurant, and has music. Category for that location would show under the column with the header row “category”…. hotel,restaurant,music
Alternatively, to define parent/child relationships , i.e. hierarchical categories , use a double colon as the separator Example the Parent is Facility, the child is showroom.
Facility::Showroom.
The Premier Add On includes an option to run location geocoding on a regularly scheduled interval. This can be useful for a hands-off approach when loading locations remotely through direct data connections.
Included in MySLP Professional and WPSLP Experience.
Find it under Settings | Results | Results Interaction
When the Use Dial Link for Phone Setting is checked it will make the phone number in your locations results clickable to auto dial by adding a tel: based hyperlink.
The dial-ready hyperlink will be used wherever the [slp_location] shortcode is used. This includes the results under the map, directory landing pages, and in Store Pages if the [slp_location] shortcode is used instead of the [storepage field=”phone”] shortcode.
Use along with the Phone Extension Delimiter setting to handle pauses for extensions.
Formerly labelled: Make a Dial Link Phone number (clickable)
Settings that impact how JavaScript works on your site. Note, if you subscribe to the MySLP SaaS, you will not see a General tab. With the MySLP we take care of this for you! The My Store Locator Plus service is a fully-managed application that works with any website or mobile development platform.
reflects the jQuery version that is currently used with the Store Locator Plus version you are using. The SLP jQuery versions are in compliance with the WordPress minimal version requirements.
This settings forces the Store Locator Plus JavaScript (slp.js) to be loaded when your WordPress Theme header is loaded. This is NOT the way to go. It is recommended that you turn OFF “Force Load JavaScript” and instead contact your theme author. See Troubleshooting for more information
Store Locator Plus has a checkbox under the General /User Interface tab called Force Load Javascript
Having this checked forces the JavaScript for Store Locator Plus to load in the header of EVERY page on your site. This can slow down your site and will disable various Store Locator Plus features. If you need to do this to make SLP work you should ask your theme author to add proper wp_footer() support to their code, or switch to a theme that behaves properly.
If you see the word Experience in the SLP back end you are not using the latest version of SLP. As of version 4.7.9 the menu tab formerly named “Experience” is now named Settings in Store Locator Plus . This change was made because of the confusion people had with the name in the menu and the Experience add-on. The settings under this tab determine how the front end, that part of the plugin your site visitors interact with, looks and behaves. The settings under this tab change how the plugin appears to the site visitor and what functionality is available to the site visitor. Some of the attributes set here can be overridden via shortcode attributes with the Experience Add-on.
Additional Results Interaction features are available with the MySLP/Enterprise or WPSLP Premier Add On. The results interaction set of features provides a variety of visual cues on the location map to indicate the location a user has clicked when viewing a list of locations., providing a variety of additional options beyond the standard Info Bubble that Store Locator Plus displays when a location is clicked.
Use the Experience add-on to completely disable the Info Bubble under the map and only use these interactive result indicators. When a visitor to your site clicks on the results marker they will see additional information such as description you have entered for that location, in addition to the fields that are populated for the location.
