Store Locator Map Center, Location Sensor, Address patches

Store Locator Plus® 5.7 has been released to assist with several features available in the Professional and Enterprise packages of our SaaS product as well as features for the Power and Experience add-on packages for the WordPress plugin.

Location Sensor Refinements

The locations sensor is available for users of the Professional or Enterprise SaaS service.    For those using the legacy WordPress plugins the Power add on is required.     Keep in mind your site must be an https-based URL which will require you have an SSL certificate.

This patch enhances the consistency of location detection features where some combinations of settings were forcing the location sensor to enable when the feature was turned off.

This setting is found under Store Locator Plus® | General | User Interface.

Center Map

Setting the center of the map can happen several ways.  The default for all maps is to use the value stored under Store Locator Plus® | Settings | Map for Center Map At.

Store Locator Address Accuracy

My Store Locator Plus® was updated this weekend with new software. While we were at it the MySLP servers were upgraded.

Better address accuracy outside the United States

The biggest change to the My Store Locator Plus® software was the implementation of region data handling. The map domain, aka “region” setting under Store Locator Plus | Settings | Map influences the accuracy of the results returned for new location addresses as well as user searches.

Users in countries like Australia or parts of Western Europe should see a notable improvement in the accuracy of locations returned when searching for an address. The map engines, primarily Google, that are used to geocode addresses are more heavily influenced by the region setting in those countries.

WordPress Subdirectory Install and The REST API

Seems there is a number of new people having issues with the Store Locator Plus® address lookup feature due to a failed REST API request. With Store Locator Plus 5 all address lookups are routed back through the WordPress site via the REST API in order to protect Google API keys.

If your site is running WordPress from a subdirectory you may run into issues if your web server is not configured to properly handle REST API routing. Especially if the site is using “pretty permalinks”, any Permalink setting under WordPress Settings | Permalinks other than “plain”.

The problem is that most of the Codex articles on the subject of doing a “WordPress in it’s own directory” installs came out well before the REST API existed. Most, dare we say ALL, have not been updated since and completely ignore the corner case of a WordPress subdirectory install with Permalinks enabled.