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.

However this can be overridden when using the WordPress plugin by passing along the map_center attribute on the [slplus] shortcode.    This will force the map to override the default allowing different results to be shown on different pages such as places closest to Boston MA on the /Boston page of your site with [slplus map_center=’Boston MA’]

Users of the SaaS product to not deploy with shortcodes.  This patch does not affect them.

Passing Address In URL

Users of the WordPress plugin can deploy maps on pages that accept an inbound ?address=Boston+MA parameter which will act as if the user typed that address into the search box on the locator.     This feature has been refined with SLP 5.2.8 with the Experience 5.2.5 add-on.

We are looking into implementation of this feature for the SaaS product to mimic the behavior without the extra overhead of hosting separate JavaScript snippets on pages.

For WordPress Users

You should backup your database and all settings before upgrading to the latest release.     Update Store Locator Plus first then update the Power and Experience add on to the latest release.

For our SaaS Users

The latest patches have already been tested and installed.