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.

Editing Location Category – Patched

Another day, another update — this time to fix assigning categories to locations.   For users of our Professional level service there was an interesting bug that would stop location category icons from showing up on the main list of locations in the admin panel.  It also had the affect of not checking of the proper assigned categories when editing a location; This made it look like a location was not assigned to any categories which was not always the case.

To make things more interesting, this bug only appeared if you turned off the Show Category Icons setting under Settings | Results. By default this setting is on, so most users did not notice the bug. For those that turn that setting off the category icons and names went away on the location list like the one below. It also meant the edit location form was not checking the matching categories.

Location category display on location listings.

This issue has been resolved.

For WordPress users , you will need to upgrade to the Power add on version 2301.11.X to see this bug fix. For our SaaS platform users, the update will go online this week — no further action is necessary.

post image courtesy of pixabay