Locator Styling Updates

Updating the locator styling default settings is the latest customer concern to be addressed as we continue to improve the overall Store Locator Plus® user experience. Updates are being made on a regular basis for both our SaaS platform users and WordPress plugins users. The latest update focuses on changing the default layout that users see when they first use Store Locator Plus®.

The Locator Styles

Locator Styles is a pre-defined set of Store Locator Plus® settings combined with a set of cascading style sheets (CSS) to go with those settings. The idea is to help users by providing a set of pre-defined layouts for the locator applet along with common settings users prefer when using our locator and directory software. For example, the pre-defined settings will change things like the internal applet layout — when a visitor searches for your retail locations do the list of locations appear on the left side of the map, or below? It can also set things like “do you want to show the label Phone ” before displaying a phone number or show nothing at all?

The idea is to provide a solid starting point of pre-loaded settings that can be modified after the base style is set.

Our Store Locator January 2023 Updates

Store Locator Plus® has been updated to patch various minor bugs and to improve code design as we move toward implementing new React applets that will modernize the user experience.    The updates in our mid-January release should be transparent to most users.   No action is required for our SaaS platform users.    WordPress plugin users will want to update to the latest version when convenient.

Patches To Our Store Locator Include…

Fix remote web asset test algorithm. This algorithm would sometimes generate a missing variable warning for urlToFetch. In some cases this would cause Store Locator Plus® to think remote web assets (images, CSS files, and other objects hosted on a different website) to show as missing. This has been resolved.

Update code variables, global naming conventions, and related background development elements. These changes are non-functional changes. They are mostly code comments that provide hints to the integrated development environments used by our developers to provider smarter code hints, autocompletion, and quality control services. These changes do not affect functionality.

URL Location Selector Patch and WordPress Listing Update

Store Locator Plus® was updated today with a patch that ensures the location selection via URL remains functional.   The location selection via URL allows you to build links on your site that load up a page that hosts the Store Locator Plus® map and auto-select a specific location.      Changes in the JavaScript standard impacted the way this feature works, causing inconsistent behavior in different browser.   The patch that was put online today for our SaaS users eliminates the inconsistency and re-enables this feature for all browsers.

Users of our self-managed WordPress plugins will need to download the latest Store Locator Plus® release from our website.    Normally this would be available directly from the WordPress plugin directory, however the WordPress plugin team has yet to approve our latest updates.  Until they approve the updates and re-enable free downloads, the only option for WordPress plugin users to get the latest release is to purchase the base plugin from our WordPress store.

Tired of waiting for the WordPress plugin team to re-activate the plugin and provide quick-and-easy automated updates?   Switch over to the Store Locator Plus® SaaS release and you never have to deal with updating your locator plugin stack again.    We handle all those details for you.   Prices start as low as $5/month.