What To Buy : Rank Hide Import 10K Locations With Products Offered

Question: I would like to use your plugin to add location searching to my site. I would like to be able to rank and even possibly remove locations from the search results.  Also, each location offers different products of mine. So, if a user selects a product and a zip code I would like to show them locations that offer the product they are looking for ranked in order of my ranking system. I have many locations (10k +). Can you please let me know what add-ons I will need to accomplish my goals? I definitely need to be able to upload CSV.

Settings vs. Experience in the User Interface

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.

Store Locator Plus Base free plugin under the OLDExperience tab
Store Locator Plus Base free plugin under the OLD Experience tab
SETTINGS Tab under version 4.7.9

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.

Q. We are developing a new website and want to move the content can I add the plug-in data we already have, into the new website?

A. If you are moving something like a staging/test site to a new site and want to bring everything over intact , the Store Locator Plus author strongly recommends looking into the WordPress backup tool Vault Press, or better ,  Jet Pack.   One of the features included , besides real-time incremental backups of your site with restore points, is the ability to restore the site to an alternate site.

Q. What is the purpose of ranking under category manager?

Category ranking is a feature when you are using the Power Add-on  (for the self managed WPSLP plugin) or the Professional or higher level  subscription for MYSLP SaaS  with the category manager. The rank is used to sort the categories which will affect the map marker that is used when a location has been assigned more than one category. Following the page ranking paradigm set by WordPress, the rank field is a simple numeric weighting for the categories. This extended data attribute for categories makes it easy to re-arrange the “weight” of categories for map marker selection without mangling category slugs. The lower the number, the higher the precedence for the map marker.

The option to set a category rank can be found under the Store Locator Plus Categories tab.

Set map view

You can change  the built-in Google map view to any that Google has to offer “hybrid, road map, satellite (aerial), terrain”  The settings are under Store Locator Plus/ Settings/Map ,scroll down to the section under Appearance  and use the drop down under Map Type to change and then save changes.

If you are on MYSLP you will see the StoreLocatorPlus panel in the left admin panel, select settings/map.

 

 

No Results Found label

The text that displays  when there are no locations to be displayed   can be  changed under Settings/Results in the section under Appearance. Type a message in the box  to whatever you want the site visitor to see when there are no results found.

Example of  the text added under the SLP Settings/results  and how it appears to the site visitor  front end when no locations or results found: