Google Maps Archives | Store Locator Plus®

A New Location Management Interface

Posted by lcleveland in Release Notes, SaaS, Store Locator Plus

Our user interface overhaul of Store Locator Plus® continues with a new location management interface. We’ve finally replaced the 1980s style location management interface Store Locator Plus® inherited from WordPress. The old PHP, HTML, and JavaScript table has been replaced with a modern React alternative. The new location management interface comes with all kinds of new ways to organize, sort, and filter your existing location data.

The new location management interface is available for both our WordPress and our SaaS users. SaaS users don’t need to do anything to get the new updates, they will be available next time you login to your SaaS account. WordPress users will need to upgrade their existing plugins to the latest release to get these new features.

Filter Locations

Complex location filters coming in the August 2026 release of SLP.

Complex filters can be built on locations. All of the filters we had with the previous filters drop down menu are still available, plus dozens of additional options.

The filters apply across the entire data set with response times that are vastly improved over the prior versions. Large sets of locations can now be filtered with ease.

Built a wide variety of logic combinations for any location data field.

Data matching options include:

contains | does not contain
equals | does not equal
starts with
ends with
is empty | is not empty
is any of

All fields can be combined with AND or OR logic to display specific locatio

Improved Quick Search

Searching across all fields for the 2059 text (found it in the latitude field in this example).

We’ve completely retooled the quick search feature in the new location management interface..

It still searches across multiple fields, but it now searches across all text fields in the location set not only the name and primary address fields. And it is fast. Much faster than past iterations.

Change The Column Layout

The name column pinned to the left, the other data scrolls under it.

A myriad of options are now available for how you see your data on the locations list.

Sort columns in any combination.
Drag columns to reorder them.
Pin columns to the left or right of the table.
Hide columns.

The best part is Store Locator Plus® remembers your customization between sessions. No more re-sorting or changing column layouts every time you log back in or visit a different page. We’ve added a notification with an easy reset button in case you ever need to quickly get back to the default

Change The Row Density

While more row management options (like grouping, ordering, etc.) are coming – for now we’ve given the basic option to set the height of the display with several row density options available: Compact, Standard, and Comfortable.

August ’26 Locator Style Refresh

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software, Release Notes, SaaS, Store Locator Plus

We’ve been working on refreshing the existing Locator Styles as part of our 2026 user interface design refresh. Locator Styles provide preset user interface designs for the public-facing side of Store Locator Plus®. The styles provide an easy way to generate a new look for what your customers see on your website when looking for places you sell your wares or provide services.

Our Locator Styles worked well when they were crafted five or six years ago, but they need a refresh to meet today’s interface design standards. We’ve started working through our catalog of pre-defined styles with refreshes that work better with modern themes on WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Shopify and other web presence solutions. The first round of refreshes it meant to upgrade the most popular styles while provide as much backwards compatibility with older web themes.

The good news it that the updated styles are not implemented automatically even if your Store Locator Plus® installation is using one of the Locator Styles we have updated. To try out the revised version of a style you need to select a new style and activate it via the Style Manager in Store Locator Plus® or reload the style if it is already active on your site. With activating a new style or reloading the current style no changes will be made to your installation.

Our revisions for early August 2026 include the Default, Bobbitt, and Bennet locator styles. These updates are now online for most users.

Default Locator Style

The Default locator style is the style that is the default layout everyone starts with. This is designed to change multiple settings back to their initial configuration and provide generic styling that inherits or works alongside multiple web presence themes.

This is the basic layout for Store Locator Plus®. It allows default browser and website themes to dictate the element styling. It has settings that take advantage of Enterprise and Professional level features.

Subscription	Settings Changed
Advanced	CSS settings, General locator layout Search layout, Search category dropdown style Results layout Map layout, Map info bubble layout
Professional	plus… Location categories Search form style, Search by name, Category selection Results header, Prevent result listing wrap, Paginate results, Show country hours and phone, Category icons on results Map styling, hide home marker, map width, map height
Enterprise	plus… Search box placeholder text Map cluster markers, Google map style, map loading indicator

Bennett Locator Style

The Bennett locator style was created years ago for a client with a specific user interface design requested to blend with their website.

Search: Designed to search by category, city, state, tags or the dealer name versus the standard address or zip centric search.
Presents the category options as clickable buttons. City and State selectors are via a drop down selection. Tag search and dealer name is a text input.
Displays a reset search button to back to the original search with no filters.

Results: Presented as a 4-column design with name, country, phone, and website as the primary output.
Gray highlight on hover over location.
Light yellow highlight for featured locations.

This theme has been designed to work best with Enterprise subscriptions as it uses cluster markers, table layouts, and scroll map into view features. Category buttons, column result layouts, and other elements require Professional or Enterprise subscriptions.

Bobbitt Locator Style

The Bobbitt style was another customer request.

A yellow color scheme with a simplified search interface.
Does NOT show an address search.
Focus is on searching by name (if enabled), tags, categories, city, and state.

Results layout shows only the name, address and directions.

Location details are in the map info bubble.

This theme has been designed to work best with Enterprise subscriptions as it uses category search, tag search, city search, and state search features.

More updates are planned for our two-dozen-plus locator styles throughout the remainder of the year. We are also working on creating more advanced interactive styles that go beyond simple layout and styling. Check the Style menu and click the “New…Old” button on the top right of the style stack to see what updates we’ve released most recently.

Note: WordPress users will want to backup their installation to ensure they can recover any settings that may be changed when trying out new styles. SaaS users can review the Settings History to review what was changed and copy settings back as needed. We are working on a “restore previous setting” feature in Settings History to make this easier in the future. Contact us if you need assistance restoring your SaaS styling.

Store Locator Plus® May Updates

Posted by lcleveland in Google Maps, Map Software, Plugins, Release Notes, SaaS, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus

Several minor updates have been made to the Store Locator Plus® application that was released this week. As always, our SaaS platform users do not need to do anything to receive the updates.

WordPress users will need to manually download and install the Store Locator Plus® base plugin to get updates since the WordPress plugin directory is not properly distributing updates at this time. Once upgrading to the latest version, the main Store Locator Plus® plugin will route directly to our update servers and start receiving inline updates (no manual download zip file, activate process).

The following items are included in this update…

Store Locator Plus® WordPress Plugin Updates

As noted in the opening of this article, the main Store Locator Plus® plugin for WordPress now pulls updated directly from our official update server. If you are on a version older than 2604.06.01, you will need to login to your our WordPress plugin store and manually download then install the new version. Note: Our SaaS platform users do NOT need to do this, head on over to the Store Locator Plus® Dashboard and login.

Make sure your .zip file does NOT have a different name as that can confuse WordPress. The file name should be store-locator-plus.zip. If you end up with store-locator-plus-2.zip (or any other version), WordPress will install multiple copies of the plugin as it assumes the prefix before the .zip extension is a unique plugin name. Not our design, that is legacy WordPress for you.

Another reason to think about replacing your self-managed WordPress plugin install with our fully managed SaaS version. (As an added incentive – we have more features coming to SaaS only with plans for better user interaction reports coming for all plan levels , joining our Settings History feature that was added for all SaaS users in Q4 2025.)

Google Map Domains (Country Codes)

In one of our recent updates, we extended the list of country codes that are supported to match the full list of 100+ countries available on Google Maps today. Two things happened with that update which we missed on release which are now fixed.

First – our Map Domain (country) selection was ordered by country codes (the 2-letter code assigned to each country) which did NOT match the order of the text displayed on the drop down menu. That meant that “United Kingdom” with a NEW country code of “gb” appeared in the middle of the “Gs” on our list. That’s not right! Easy fix to sort our dropdown list by displayed text not country codes. This was a non-functional change but makes the user experience work as expected.

Speaking of United Kingdom, apparently in the ancient history of the Google Map Domains there was an alternative country code of “uk” versus the standardized code of “gb”. Apparently Google Maps stopped supporting “uk” as a country code, which meant that any of our users that had “United Kingdom” selected as their map domain started having issues. Their country code of “uk” was not longer found, and Google did the obvious thing… use the first country code on the list of “Ascension Islands” to try to show the map and addresses. In the most recent update, Store Locator Plus® will automatically convert anyone with the “uk” code to the “gb” code on first launch of the plugin. SaaS user accounts have already been recitified.

Google Maps Latitude/Longitude Links

Another minor update related to Google and the map interface is the link in Location Details. Under each location is the latitude and longitude of the location. Google changed their map search URL which resulted in those links bringing up a 404 page. This has been resolved and once again show the location on a separate Google Maps window. This allows for a quick sanity check that the encoded latitude and longitude align with the Google Maps public service.

Image by Lance Cleveland from Pixabay