The July release of Store Locator Plus™ has been completed and includes a number of updates such as the scheduled imports patch for our Professional and Enterprise level users.   We’ve included a number of changes in the location processing engine as well that helps improve browser memory consumption as well as performance for sites with larger lists of locations.    These updates are already online for our MySLP users.

You’ll find similar patches and updates in our WordPress plugin version 4.9.17.

Scheduled imports patch

This patch addresses and issue where the import scheduling form was not being processed, preventing changes to the import file location, interval, or time at which the import runs.    New sites could not schedule imports and had to import location CSV files “by hand”.  The patch addresses the issue.

Schedule imports are provided at theProfessional and Enterprise levels and are part of the WordPress Power add on.

More map controls

Our Enterprise level users will find several new controls to enable or disable built-in Google Map elements.  A simple checkbox now allows users to turn the Full Screen and zoom controls on or off in addition to the previously-available “Stick Man” , scale, and type controls.

This option is also available to WordPress plugin users with an active Premier subscription.

Managed locator service performance

In mid-July we took the time to migrate the fully managed locator service over to an upgraded database cluster.    The new database cluster is not only more resilient as it is spread across more replicating nodes in different physical locations — it is FASTER.   Not orders of magnitude but it is showing a 20-30% average increase in time needed to lookup locations or account data.     The database is now better positioned to handle the continue growth of our MySLP user base as more people discover the cost and performance benefits of using a managed service; a definite time and money saver with Google’s new pricing policies going into effect this month.

And for our WordPress plugin people

Not to be left out, the latest updates also include a number of improvements for the WordPress users.    Our SEO Pages module that is built into the Power plugin had significant updates in this release.  These updates extend the power and flexibility of the store Pages.

Some of the improvements to Pages include:

  • Updated [slp_directory] directives to build more dynamic and flexible location listings.
  • The SEO Pages maps now inherit general map settings like the inner map JSON styling and controls settings.
  • The new [slp_location <attribute> shortcode in Pages provides consistency with the below-map results including rendering HTML in the description field.
  • Patches to the [slp_pages] shortcode allows two different calls to the shortcode to appear on the same page with different settings in each.

We’re still working on how to present SEO pages in a way that is both easy to implement and does not burden your site or our servers for the MySLP crowd.   We’ll get there, but it is not ready yet.