How To : Location Categories

Assumptions

WordPress environment is setup and configured including activation of the following plugins

  • Store Locator Plus®
  • SLP Power add on

In addition map service (Google API keys) should be in place and some locations should be added to the system.

A page has been created with the [slplus] shortcode present and the map is rendering properly.

Users are logged in as a WordPress administrator (the process will be slightly different for SaaS users).

Adding Categories To Locations

Objective

Create a location category and attach it to an existing location.

User Action: Add A Location Category

  1. Click on Store Locator Plus® | Categories in the WordPress sidebar menu.
  2. In the left “Add New Category Form”…
    1. Type a category name. (Restaurant)
    2. Click Add New Category
Result

The new category should appear on the category list on the page.

Category list after adding the restaurant category.

User Action: Attach Category To Location

  1. Click on Store Locator Plus® | Locations in the WordPress sidebar menu.
  2. Click the Edit action icon on the first location.
  3. Check off the box next to “Restaurants” in the Power | Categories section of the form.
  4. Click Save.
Result

The category is assigned to the location and appears on the location table.

The location with an assigned restaurant category. This view is showing fewer columns as the Screen Options was updated to removed unused columns from the table view.

User Action: Show Category Select On Front End

  1. Click on Store Locator Plus® | Settings in the WordPress sidebar menu.
  2. Change the Category Selector setting to “Single Drop Down”.
  3. Click Save
  4. On the front end, go to the page that has the [slplus] shortcode.
Result

The search form for the map should show a category drop down.

The front end page with the [slplus] shortcode, showing the category selection filter.

User Action : Filtering Locations With Category

  1. On the front end, go to the page that has the [slplus] shortcode.
  2. Enter an address, choose a category.
  3. Click “Find Locations”.

Geocoding stopped working suddenly

(This page has been updated to reflect the changes in Google Cloud Platform API changes)

Most likely reasons;

  • You moved your site or changed the domain name and did not change your Google Map API key or , as of JUNE 2018 Google API changes, did NOT ADD BILLING TO YOUR API KEY . See Getting Started
  • Check your Google Platform Usage reports
  • A self-imposed usage cap has been exceeded.
  • The provided method of payment is no longer valid (for example, a credit card has expired).
  • You have exceeded the QPS limits for a given API.
  • If you have the Power add-on and are using the import function , your csv file is incorrect, or your header rows are not accurate,  or they have wrong field names, the columns may be misaligned and the data field for an address could not import and/or does not geocode. Check your import message log.
  • Google does not recognize an address. See FAQ post

How Store Pages Templates and [slp_pages] Work

Available In: WordPress Store Locator Plus™ with the Power add on.
Not yet available  SLP  Managed Store Locator Plus™ (MySLP) service.

Showing A List Of Pages — Full Content

[slp_pages style=”full” no_map=”1″ pages_directory_entry_css_class=”slp_page location_details col-xs-12″]
Because there is not template specified it will display the “full” (entire/complete) SEO page.    Login to the WP site and go to Store Pages as admin, click on any page.  What you see there is what you’ll get on the page list output.
That means when we add descriptions to SEO pages (either manually editing the SEO page OR with some new description magic in development today) the ENTIRE page will show up.

Location Sensor Aware

Location Sensor Aware available with the SLP SaaS subscription Professional level (or higher ) service plan

Location Sensor capability is also a feature with the WPSLP Plug in Power  add-on.

Location sensor feature can be  turned on/off with a simple check box under the SLP/General  tab.

WPSLP Power add-on General tab

When the box is checked and a visitor to your site performs a search , SLP queries the browser and requests their current location.    If the browser allows location queries it will return their geographic location which will be used to set the default search location.

Note:  This will only work with most browsers if you have a secure site and/or if your site visitor “allows” their location to be visible to you.

Google  may return a “No results found” if you do NOT have an HTTPS site and will stop the javascript from loading. SLP with the Power add-on will negate Location sensor settings entirely if you do not have https://   enabling  your page to continue to load.   If you require the location sensor functionality to work properly you must have  a valid SSL certification.

Location Aware Browsing

Accuracy varies greatly from location to location. In some places, service providers may be able to provide a location to within a few meters.  All locations returned by service providers are estimates only and we do not guarantee the accuracy of the locations provided.  Your SLP settings also determine the number of locations shown nearest the site visitor.  Settings for radius, number of results to return and center of map  all interact to show locations nearest to the site visitor.

Import using WordPress Store Locator Plus Power add-on

This page /information does not apply to SLP SaaS. This information is provided for the SLP do it yourself plug-in only

WPSLP   Power add-on  uses the built-in file up-loader provided by WordPress Core instead of a custom file import script.   Look in the Media Library in WordPress.  Make sure your install has not disabled the default WordPress media up-loader.

NOTE: As of July 2018,  if you are using the WPSLP “do it yourself” plugin with Power add-on and you have not included the latitude and longitude and require geocoding , make sure you have a Google API account and have checked off the Maps and Geocoding APIs in your library.

What to look for when importing

Do you see the CSV file you just imported? If not then your site has disabled the WordPress media uploader.

If your file IS in the media library but never gets past  the offset “0” setting check to make sure your server  has not disabled the WordPress Cron .

WP CRON can be found under Forms WP environment

Check to see if your server is preventing the wp-cron.php from being triggered.

Check your import file in the media library by clicking on it.  It should show what the file size is and the current offset. The offset is where the background process is shown while importing the file.  If it is shown as “zero” then your WordPress Uploads directory for the media library has been set to non-standard restricted access meaning the background location import process is not allowed to open the file after it was uploaded.

Click on the file to see the file size and meta data

Legacy Add-ons not compatible with SLP version 4.8 and higher

 Legacy Add-ons

If you want to keep the legacy add-ons, do not upgrade the base plug-in to version 4.7 or above.   All individual legacy add-ons have been phased out and replaced over the past 2  plus years due to security patches, coding changes, WP updates, maintenance overhead and inefficiencies that were no longer viable to support.  To find the match to your Legacy Add-ons,  see FAQ: Legacy versus featured add-on

Please follow the SLP news feeds for important information about updates.

Even if you received a notice in your WordPress admin panel that an update to your base plug-in is available, you do not need to click the update button.  All version updates to SLP are optional.  We do not auto-update like WordPress does.

If  you already updated (most likely if you are reading this) and now try to roll back SLP to earlier version to o retain the Legacy add-on compatibility.

Note:  Due to the security patches required by Word Press  you may also need to rollback WordPress.  Before attempting to roll back or downgrade WordPress or any plugins , make sure you have a recent back-up of your site.  Do not attempt this on a live site.

The SLP author does not recommend rolling back versions of any software or WP.   This is time consuming and messy, requires technical savvy,  and you will miss  important security patches.     If you are confident that you know what is entailed and are willing to take the risk;  it is still recommended to use a back-up service such as  Vault Press or Jet Pack. 

P.S. If you do not want the headache of maintaining back-ups , updating, obtaining a new Google API, you may want to consider moving over to a My SLP plan.   See  MYSLP SAAS

 

How to delete multiple tags under locations

With the Power add-on you will find additional Bulk Actions under the Locations/Manage panel.  There is a  drop down menu under the Bulk actions tab that can be utilized to remove many, some or all tags associated with the location data.  Check off which locations you want to remove the tags from, or you may check off all and select the filter to “Apply to all”

Bulk Action with Power allows you to remove tags

Troubleshooting Large scale Exports/Imports

Issue: Exports/Imports Incomplete

Multiple large-scale exports (export function is available with Power Add-on ) have been tested on the Store Locator Plus dev sites. On a relatively small server, a virtual machine with 2GB RAM running CentOS 6, we  have been able to export 10,000 locations within 15 minutes with no issues. Special characters and extended data have also exported without issue.

If you are experiencing  issues there are several things to check that can cause problems during an export:

Web Server Process Limits

Apache, and nginx  have per-process limits. This is built into the web server to prevent “runaway” processes that eat up all of the CPU and memory on the server over time. On shared servers this limit is very low and typically allows 30 seconds to 2 minutes of processing time. Large data sets can use up to 5 minutes or more of processing time. Make sure your server has a high enough limit to allow the entire data export to complete execution.

Additional Layout Shortcodes with Power Add-on

If you have the Power Add-on in addition to the Experience Add-on you have additional fields that can be displayed with the use of shortcodes and attributes.

Contact Fields

The Power Add-on has Contact Fields that can be associated with your locations for adding internal special  ids  for updates or to add filters. The contact fields will not automatically appear in your results on the front end.