Store Locator Plus

Action Hooks for Third Party Developers

More action hooks are have been added to assist in third party plugin development.

Updates To Admin Interface

We continue to refine the admin interface to clean things up a bit and do some re-organization of the UI.

Admin CSS Loading

The Store Locator Plus admin CSS is now loaded only for the Store Locator Plus admin pages, leaving the rest of your admin panel intact and unmodified.

New Labels Available

You can now set custom labels for the text for “Directions”, “Hours”, “Phone” and “Fax” on the search results output.

These labels are also now used for the manage locations and add locations interfaces.   This will make it easier to re-purpose those fields for other things, like turning the “hours” field into a “my favorite brew at this store” field if you choose.

Turn Off Find Locations Image

For most of the legacy version of Store Locator Plus the Find Locations button is an image.  In one of our releases the default image that was rendering as the Find Locations buttonbroke.   I haven’t been doing the hands-on Store Locator Plus code work for nearly 2 years now.   When I fixed this other bug the image re-appeared.

Ick.  I don’t like that image but many of the existing customers got used to it.   They don’t like change so I left the image intact with 3.6.

I like the regular form input button for find locations.  I can skin it in CSS and not have some odd-looking creature on my forms on my custom designed sites.

Thus I added a “Use Text For Find Locations” option.  This makes it easy to get rid of that pesky Find Locations image and skin the button however you’d like by tweaking the CSS files.

I also cleaned up a bunch of directory processing code that made loading SLP a tiny bit slower while searching for the Find Locations button, but you probably won’t notice the few CPU cycles that were saved.

Better Icon Interface / Storing Custom Icons

The icon selection interface has been modified and put into a scrolling selector so the map settings page behaves.

Along the way I also fixed a bug in the custom icons upload & processing.    You can store your own set of custom icons (and language files for that matter) in a private directory.  It is under your WordPress uploads directory named sl-uploads.  Icons go in the custom-icons subdirectory there.  The normal path is something like /wp-content/uploads/slp-uploads/custom-icons.  The exact path may vary based on your WordPress installation.

Put your custom icons in that directory and they won’t get removed if you ever do a de-activate/delete update of Store Locator Plus.   Dropping new icons in your custom-icons folder will get them to show up in the map settings page.  Just make sure they have a different name than pre-existing SLP icons so they don’t get overwritten during updates (all SLP icons stored in the icon directory get copied here for safe keeping on each update).

New Defaults

• Turned off “show city pulldown” on new installs.
• Turned off “show country pulldown” on new installs.

Bug Fixes

A number of bugs have been squashed in this release, mostly related to the JavaScript processor.

• Resolve issue with search not being triggered on some sites.
• Resolve issue with city selection then search not working on some sites
• Resolve issue with initial locations not showing up on some sites.
• Eliminate __gmarker error message in JavaScript.
• Eliminate  amarker reference error message in JavaScript.

Behind-The-Scenes

Work continues to reduce the overall complexity of the code and to reduce conflicts with other plugins as well as WordPress itself.  Work continues to replace legacy WordPress 1.X and 2.X methodologies with 3.x methods for a more stable and more robust environment.  This will improve performance as well as lead to rapid development of our own and third party plugins.

One of the notable updates in this release was removing all ereg() and ereg_replace() references.  These are deprecated in PHP5.3.  Depending on your server warning level this could fill up log files.   Regardless of the warning level these functions are slower than their replacements.   Over 80 ereg() and ereg_replace() functions were replaced with the newer faster version.

The search results table under the map has more unique store location IDs added to the output elements, making it easier to augment the javascript engine.  This combined with the hooks & filters makes it easier for coders out there to bend SLP to their needs and create some cool UIs with the plugin.

Pro Pack

There were no significant pro-pack-only updates in version 3.6.

Store Pages

There were no significant pro-pack-only updates in version 3.6.

Tagalong

Close to final release, coming in early November.

Get more control over how your locations are categorized.  This new premium plugin will allow you to change image markers and set default icons for location categories.

Features

• Filter search results with category selection pulldown.  Turn pulldown on/off on the Tagalong admin panel.
• Add a custom label before the category selection pulldown.
• Only show active categories on pulldown, option on admin panel.
• Add an “any/all” item on the pulldown, option on admin panel lets you set the text to appear.
• Set a map marker icon based on the assigned location category.
• Set a general icon based on the location category.

Interim Patches

3.6.1

* Patch: fix “use location sensor” not showing map if people choose to deny location access.
* Patch: fix(?) the div code below the map on sites that have a language/texturize plugin or theme enabled.
* Performance: eliminate some unused code and reduce the total file count by combining function files.

3.6.2

* Hopefully removes the open HTML tags under the map.
** Only happens on ThemeForest themes from what I can tell.
** Do not hold it against me if this doesn’t work, Sam Adams helped with this patch.

More information has surfaced in relation to this problem and the patches.  It is a known problem with various Envato/Theme Forest themes.   We are working with Envato to help resolve some of those issues.