How Store Pages Templates and [slp_pages] Work

Posted by lcleveland in for WordPress, Power Add On, Professional

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

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.

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.

Store Locator Plus INFO Plug-in Environment

Posted by cici in for WordPress, Info, Support

Plug-in environment

We often have questions posted from users asking why something is or is not working. The information needed to be able to assist them properly and efficiently is shown under the SLP/INFO tab under Environment

What is meant by the (Plugin) Environment.

The plugin environment shows the versions of Store Locator Plus, and any active SLP add-ons you have installed, as well as the WordPress version, php version, MYSQL , the domain name and other useful data specific to the WPSLP environment.

You can also find the latest release versions under your account Downloads List, and/or review the Versions under the Support tab on the WordPress Store Locator Plus home site to see if you have the most recent version of Store Locator Plus and the various add-on packs.

Store Locator Plus 4.8 and above updates will disable Legacy add-ons

Posted by cici in Advanced, FAQ, for WordPress, Support, Troubleshooting

Legacy Add-ons

The auto-update of WordPress v 4.8.2 and above required a major update to the WP Store Locator Plus free base plug-in resulting in the end of compatibility with the popular Pro Pack , Tagalong and other Legacy add-ons. The Legacy add-ons are no longer supported nor maintained and have been retired over the past two years as announced in news posts, blogs , changelogs, mail campaigns and social media. If you are not sure if your add-on is considered Legacy, see the FAQ comparison featured to Legacy add-ons

Time to invest in your future

Some of our customers were surprised by the change and retirement of the Legacy Add-ons. We tried to give as much of a heads up as possible using news blogs, content news to the home site and reached out using a Mail Chimp campaign for those most likely effected. Ultimately, there is no sure fire method to reach the thousands of customers who may have had these older add-ons installed. If there is one thing we know, change in the technical genre is inevitable. The SLP support team will always endeavor to help our customers transition to the new age. We pledge they will see real value-added from updating their site and software . Please take a moment to review the multiple benefits of utilizing the newer Experience add-on, Power add-on.

Although downgrading to an earlier version of SLP is an option, you may note that changes to the WordPress code and their security patches may disable features. Before making any changes to your site you should ensure you are backing up your site WP database and files. It is very important to take this step before you have issues or worse, site crashes. WordPress security has become more robust over the years.

For more information please see this important message from the author:

Store locator Plus updates and retired add-ons

Import using WordPress Store Locator Plus Power add-on

Posted by cici in FAQ, for WordPress, Locations, Power Add On, Professional, Troubleshooting

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

Posted by cici in FAQ, for WordPress, Our Add Ons, Power Add On, Support, Troubleshooting

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

Search Address Auto-complete setting

Posted by cici in Experience Add-on, FAQ, Search, Settings

Feature to have the address to auto-complete the zip code based on your location database is available with the Premier/Enterprise or the Experience add-on

When 2 or more characters are typed in the address input box, input suggestions based on location data will appear.

None (default) – do not suggest address input.
Zipcode – suggest matching zip codes.
With Premier or SLP SaaS Enterprise you can also have a zip code drop down selector

If the formatting of the autocomplete is not the way you would like it to appear, reset the Search Form Style under appearance layout.

Locator Styling determines how the auto-complete drop down box will appear on your page.

Curly Quotes In WordPress Shortcodes

Posted by lcleveland in for WordPress, Professional

WordPress blog posts likes to use curly quotes instead of straight quotes whenever you write an article. Our documentation site is built on WordPress which means many of our articles are replaced any quotes we type in an article with curly quotes.

The problem is that the WordPress shortcode processor does NOT like curly quotes. If you use curly quotes in a shortcode attribute such as [slp_directory by=”city”] and those quotes are “curly”, WordPress treats the quotes as a plain-old alphabetic character just like the C-I-T or Y in “city”. In other words WordPress things you mean “by quote-city-quote” not “by city”.

Why is that an issue?

If you copy-and-paste most examples from this documentation site WordPress will copy the “pretty curly quotes” into your shortcode. If you paste that into your WordPress page it breaks.

Straight versus curly quotes when pasted into a page.

An example of how this can impact Store Locator Plus can be seen from my example where I pasted the slp_directory shortcode directly from the docs site into my test site. I get an invalid data query because WordPress added curly-quotes to my data field name. The SLP database does not have a field name quotesl_storequote but does have a field named sl_store.

The fix?

Make sure you re-type each quote manually. Typing the ” in your blog instead of copy-and-paste will ensure you are getting “straight quotes” in your shortcode attributes not curly quotes.

This is how the example looks now that the curly quotes have been replaced with straight quotes.