WooCommerce Interface Updates

For our WordPress plugin users the Premier add on has been updated to 4.9.1 today to address several issues.  The WooCommerce interface has been patched to fix a problem for users on non-English sites.    Version 4.9.1 also has been re-tooled to work with PHP 5.3, though you really should be running PHP 5.6 as a minimum.

MySLP Enterprise users will be getting the button bar in our year-end update of MySLP.

Button Bar Category Selector

The new Button Bar category selector, introduced in our previous release, now honors the “hide empty categories” setting.  However, unlike the other category selectors using a drop down selector coming from WordPress Core, our custom button bar interface behaves more along the lines of how we think it should.  With the button bar a category is considered empty only if no locations are attached to that category.

How is that different?  A little more explanation is warranted.

A Button Bar On A Customer Site
A Button Bar On A Customer Site

Hide Empty Categories

This is a setting that is available via the Power addon.  Yes, the Power add on.  I know we are talking about Premier here, but let’s forget about that detail for now.   Premier only adds some new user interfaces to the underlying category features provided by Power.

The Power add on allows you to attach categories to locations, such as “put all these locations in the wholesale category” and “these go in the retail category”.      You can then provide an easy way for users to filter the locations they see on your map by selecting whether they want to see retail or wholesale locations.    The default category selector , if you choose to show it, is a simple drop down menu that shows any categories you’ve added to Store Locator Plus.

Normally ALL categories you’ve created are shown. Even if there are NO locations that exist within the category.   If you have NO wholesale locations and someone picks that from the drop down category selector they see no results.

A long time back we added a “Hide If Empty” option for the category selector.   However there is a big “gotcha”.   It uses the WordPress built-in functionality for category drop downs since we didn’t want to rewrite their huge category drop down menu library.  No need to re-invent the wheel.   BUT this built-in selector has a rather unique way of defining what is an empty category.  For WordPress a category is empty if everything assign to the category is in draft mode.

Draft Mode? What?

Yes, draft mode.   We also did not want to write our own custom category engine.  Actually, to be honest WE DID do that back in Store Locator Plus 1.0.  It was a disaster.  Why recreate something built into WordPress?   Around SLP 3.0 we converted everything to use the WordPress category system.   That system uses a lot of underpinnings from pages and posts.    I think you can see where this is going.

What does that mean for hide empty?

As noted in a little not on the Hide Empty checkbox, this feature ONLY WORKS IF PAGES ARE ENABLED.  Yup, if you are using Hide Empty to not show some things on that category drop down you must ALSO be using Pages ( Enable Pages is under the General tab, BTW).     Not only that but you must change the default to be PUBLISHED instead of draft mode, which creates public SEO friendly pages for every location in your database.

You need to do that because if you don’t the WordPress category drop down creator will consider every page set to draft or private mode to be “unused” , which means those locations are not counted as part of the category.

So… The Button Bar Hide Empty

If you are using the button bar to show a category selector you can also use hide empty.   Empty means NO LOCATIONS are using that category.

For the other category selectors, like any of the drop down selectors, the old-school “it is empty if pages it not enabled” still applies.  We’re working on fixing that in the Power add on in a future release.

Custom Map Markers

Our latest how-to video for Store Locator Plus® is online. In the latest How-To video we show you how to set your custom map markers based on types of locations.    This is done using the categorization tool available in the Power Add On for WordPress or the Professional and Enterprise plans for Store Locator Plus® SaaS Edition.

Custom Map Markers

The default map marker design with Store Locator Plus® is to set your map markers to be identical for all locations.

These markers can be customized so they are specific to each location. Or a select few locations can have their own marker while the rest use the standard marker. There is also an option to set the map marker based on the type of location, for example those in the “Service” category use a read marker and the “Sales” category use a yellow marker.

You can find also find help on adding and editing location categories in our documentation.