Phone Extension Dialer

Posted by lcleveland in Enterprise, Professional

included with MySLP Enterprise and/or WPSLP Premier.

Employ telephone dialer links with extension pauses by turning on the Use Dial Link For Phone option and setting the Phone Extension Delimiter option.

When both are enabled the links for phone numbers are set to the defacto tel: hyperlink and if a phone number contains the text specified by the Phone Extension Delimiter option it will insert a long pause at that point before continuing to dial.

This method uses the oft-support comma placeholder, adding two commas to extend the pause to allow for slower phone systems to catch up and wait for the extension to be entered.

This output behavior will appear on results under the map, directory landing pages, and store pages.

Location Sensor Aware

Posted by lcleveland in General, Power Add On, Professional, User Interface

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.

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.

Google Geocoding and Browser keys

Posted by cici in Advanced, FAQ, for WordPress, General, Server, Troubleshooting

This article effects the WordPress StoreLocatorPlus users “Do it yourself ” plug-in with pay as you go Google Maps API keys

MAP Service and API Keys

Changes as of June 11, 2018 will effect the WordPress Store Locator Plus (DIY) community. Google requires all sites using map services to have an API key with a billing account attached. See Google Developers console.

The Browser key is used to display the map and handle user-input addresses during a location search. The Geocoding API is used on your WordPress server to geocode locations you’ve entered via the Google “Places” box and APIs. You do not need the additional geocoding “key” unless you have added restrictions. You do however, need to have the geocoding API enabled in your Google projects library.

Mixed Content Warnings and Site migration

Posted by cici in Advanced, FAQ, Support, Troubleshooting

Google’s push for all websites to be HTTPS has been a game changer over the past few years with many companies switching from HTTP to HTTPS with some hiccups along the way. Some of the site transfer mishaps are minor, but if done incorrectly can cause your plug-ins to misbehave , and often is the case, after the transition team has left the building.

Mixed Content Warnings – Loading Assets Over HTTP

If you have never had HTTPS on your site, you will undoubtedly run into an issue with how your site assets are loaded. By assets we are referring to things like images, JavaScript, and even your CSS. Insecure assets may not stop the green padlock from showing in browsers, but it will add an exclamation point warning to your users that information is being loaded insecurely.

Site Migrations Vary

Occasionally we see comments from customers that Store locator Plus broke their site or is not working. When asked if they recently migrated their site they often state nothing has changed. On further investigation , or by inspecting their console we often see the “Mixed Content warnings” quite often for images or icons from older versions of Store Locator Plus. This is a sure fire clue that there was indeed a “site migration”. They started out with their site when the SLP plug-in was originally installed as HTTP and now , at least part of their site, is HTTPS. This is known as a protocol migration. If you migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS, Google treats this as a site move with a URL change. That means you may need to obtain a new Google API key for SLP to work properly. With version SLP 4.9.15 you are allowed to add HTTP referrers now as long as you also obtain a geocode key. See info about those changes under news

Upfront Investment

A site migration is a great opportunity to address legacy issues. If you have outdated legacy add-ons this is a good time to invest in your future by planning for and including any update expenses in your overall budget. Including these costs in the project scope is the most cost-effective method to ensure your site stays relevant and on-track. When you consider that issues that may arise after going live will require additional time , resources and, yes, may even create downtime and loss of traffic to your site it is worth including the new versions in your budget.

Pages Appearance Settings

Posted by lcleveland in Professional

The Power add on provides settings for the CSS classes that are used to wrap the Pages list elements when rendering the slp_pages shortcode.

By default the pages list is wrapped in a div with class slp_pages_list.

Each list entry within is then inside a div with the slp_page location_details class.

Store Locator Plus Discrete Searches

Posted by lcleveland in Experience Add-on, for WordPress, Our Add Ons, Search, Settings, What To Buy

The Experience add-on for WordPress SLP or the Professional level Plan for MySLP SaaS provides a “search by city”, “search by state”, and “search by country” feature. This search form element, when enabled, will build a drop down list based on the locations in your database. This is meant to provide a hint to the user where your locations are.

The Advance level or basic SLP search button looks for locations closest based on your other search form settings. If your default radius is 100 miles and the user selects the state of Texas, the base plug-in will search for all locations within 100 miles of Google’s estimated “center of Texas”. With the Professional level plan you can select certain settings to redirect the search selector and provide other options to direct or assist your site visitor.

Horizontal | Vertical Checkbox Category Selector

Posted by lcleveland in Enterprise, Search, Settings

*Included with WPSLP Premier subscription or MySLP Enterprise level Subscriptions.

The Horizontal or Vertical Checkbox Category Selector feature is available for WPSLP Premier or MySLP Enterprise level subscription customers. The checkbox works with an “OR” selection based on the Parent category. With Premier or Enterprise you will see additional category selectors under the Settings/Search/Category section. For example : If you check the [] red and [] blue boxes on the category selector it will show any location in the red OR blue category.

Locations Loading Indicator

Posted by lcleveland in Enterprise, for Everything

The locations loading indicator shows your visitors that the server is working on returning a list of locations.

Loading Indicator

Additional loading indicators are available for MySLP Enterprise and WPSLP Premier members. Example of other options loading results if you choose “Loading indicator for Results” or for the map if you choose from dropdown “Loading indicator map”. This feature available for Store Locator Plus Premier Plugin or the SLP SaaS Enterprise customers. The locations loading indicator is enabled by selecting the “Loading Indicator” under Store Locator Plus | Store Locator Plus > Results > Appearance.

None

The default setting provided by Store Locator Plus.

Circular

A circular loading indicator.

Indicator Color

Choose the color palette for the loading indicator.

Amber on Light Grey

Blue on Light Grey

Display Location

Choose where you want the loading indicator to appear while the search is underway. It will replace the locator elements in the map, search, or results box until the locations are loaded.

Map

Results

Search

Location Limit URL control

Posted by cici in Enterprise, General, User Interface

Location Limit

The location limit feature is available exclusively to our Store Locator Plus Premier/Enterprise customers.

When the URL Control module is active you can enable location ID passing by turning on “Location Limit” under the General / User Interface tab.

When this is enabled you can pass in a limit for the number of locations to be returned when the map initially loads and when a search is performed by adding ?limit=<id> to the end of the page address where your locator map is deployed with the [slplus] shortcode.

Example: Client has 250 results to return by default but when the site via a URL link loaded they only wanted 5 to come back.

Location Limit functionality supersedes the initial default limit.

CSV Import Zip / Postal Codes formatting

Posted by lcleveland in FAQ, Professional, Professional, Support

Note: IMPORT requires Power add-on for the stand alone WPSLP plugin or if you are using MYSLP SaaS, the Professional level or higher plan.

When creating a CSV import file make sure the zip / postal code column is properly formatted as text so you do not lose leading zeros.

The column header for postal/zip codes is zip or sl_zip.

In the United States many northeastern postal codes start with zero. Many sheets, Microsoft Excel in particular, LOVE to leave off the leading zero if you enter a zip code as 03907 and save as CSV.

In Excel, and many other apps, you can force a field where you are typing in numbers to be text by starting your entry with an apostrophe (‘). Type ‘03907 when entering the data NOT 03907.

A good test to see if this is happening to you, open your CSV file in Google Sheets and see what it looks like. Does it look like the sheet above missing a zero and right aligned?

Another indicator that this column is set to a numeric type and not an text type is the data is on the RIGHT SIDE of the cell. Text is left-justified (like sl_state) and numbers are right-justified.