Details for the Advanced level SaaS service. Many features are present in the Store Locator Plus® for WordPress plugin.
With WordPress it is very easy to debug the activation process of a plugin and get a detailed log file of exactly what is going on.
Often there are hidden warnings or errors. Sometimes they are generated by the plugin. Many times they are generated by OTHER plugins or your custom WordPress theme. The first stage of debugging is to turn on the built-in WordPress debugging messages and debug log.
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:
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.
The following countries are currently supported in the Store Locator Plus plugin. These countries determine the default center starting point for location searches and determine which Google locations engine is used when searching for an address. This influences, but does not restrict, which results are returned. Regardless of what country you select as the default, any location in your location database can be returned by the search regardless of the country in which that location resides. This does not effect the zip codes necessarily. Some country postal codes are unique, others are not.
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.
Categories is available in the Power WordPress plugin or Professional level or higher in the (My)SLP Software as a service (SaaS) service.
Store Locator Plus includes a default set of data fields that is included with every installation. Various add-on packs add extended data fields.
For ALL extended data fields you can output the data in ANY info bubble, results layout, etc.if you have an add-on pack that allows you to change the layouts (Experience add-on) or if you are using the SLP SaaS Professional level Plan.
With the Power add-on or the SLP SaaS professional level plan or higher, there are options to tag a location or assign a category to a location or do both.
“Tagging” locations can be done one of two ways. The informal method is to use free-form tags that are setup via the Word Press Store Locator Plus Plug-in with the Power add on. Or the (My)SLP SaaS Professional level plan or higher The structured method is to use the Store Category Manager under the Categories tab (not available with the basic plug-in or Advance level plan)
You can change the results Layout with the Experience Add-on by using a combination of shortcodes and html. i.e. Example see Results Layout :
<a href=”[slp_location url]”[slp_location name]</a>
Use text
Force the data to be passed trough the HTML parser
Google will return various error codes depending on the data format or request timing. The following table of errors and their meanings will help you determine what is going on when Google tries to lookup up your location coordinates. The most common issue is reaching your quota limits or missing your Google API Key.
